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Wine Country is Cool, Literally! Frank Family, Deerfield Ranch
That other day I was at the Benziger winery and Mike told me that the Summer of 2010 has been the coolest in Sonoma since 1950 or so. Grapes don’t like the cold during the day, they don’t even like the cool that much. At night that’s different. An important ingredient for making a great wine grape is cool nights so that the grapes don’t release the acid that cleans the palate. Bu they need plenty of Sun during the day to make sugar, flavors and colors.
The harvest is late but this week the temps are in the 80’s and we’re seeing grape trucks all over the place. Be careful when you are driving because those big trucks filled with grapes and those little cars filled with pickers are all in a hurry. They also don’t get to sleep much because so much picking is done at night. Add that to the fact that tourists routinely come here to drink and drive on our little, twisting country roads and my advice to drive carefully becomes all the more important.
By the way, I’m not sure when this happened but we conduct informal surveys of our clients and something that we need to report is this: Frank Family Vineyards makes a great glass of wine. Every client we bring there is impressed and leaves the place singing its praises. Now they’ve always been good but they are on a roll. Our clients are not slouches in the tasting department. We bring them to some serious wineries. I’m sorry to say that I haven’t tasted at Frank Family is several years but I need to get back there, notebook in hand.
This long, stretched out season is hard on the grapes. I’ve seen a lot of raisins, and not the good kind. The other day I was watching grapes come in at the Deerfield Ranch winery. They scrutinize their grapes as they come down the conveyor, and it’s not just with field workers, but wine makers using their practiced eye. I saw them hand selecting grapes with partial damage that they were going to save by pruning. Meanwhile two pretty girl wine makers were in the cave turning over the forming cap by hand. I don’t mean with a paddle, I mean by ‘up to the elbows in grapes’ hand.
I’ve been told by people familiar with the Deerfield Ranch wines that their hand work was extreme, but the benefits were also over the top so it was nice to see them in action. I’ve been lucky that numerous times when I’ve been there recently they’ve been processing grapes, and some very good looking ones at that. Just another week in wine country!
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