Oct 23, 2019 | Wine
Update: This is a video from the Hydeout Sonoma ranch cam at 4 AM Sunday night, October 27th, just before the power went out. This blog post below was intended to be a celebration of this year‘s harvest, but with the epic wind/fire/power outages and the suffering around the county, a reality check was necessary:
I wrote a blog post in May full of worry as cold winds and rain were about to pound the just-flowering 2019 grape crop. But as is ever the case in NorCal, that bad weather came and went with no harm done, replaced with nearly perfect blue skies and sunny days. Now all of our client’s 2019 fruit is safely tucked away in barrels – having been carefully harvested, transported, de-stemmed, fermented, pressed, and barreled. Dozens of unique wines from many wonderful locations – including hillside Cabernets, gravelly Zinfandels, 20-year old Syrah vines, epic Sangiovese, jet-black Sagrantino, silky smooth Cab Franc, and aromatic Muscat Canelli.
This was the final bin of fruit – perfectly formed berries and spot-on ripeness…
The final barrels of 2019 headed for the wine cave, this ‘cuvee’ is 139 cases of a client’s Sonoma Valley red blend…
More news from around the Valley…
Stone Edge Farm – Thanks to friend Tom Angstadt, I enjoyed a front-row seat for a private tour of the McQuown’s micro-grid, an off-the-grid property purpose-built with solar panels, gas turbine, hydrogen fuel plant, hybrid-ion batteries, and an incredible MIT-alum designed interface that allows full data collection and control from this one screen (seen here). They are openly sharing this technology and may well be racing ahead of the government-funded research on energy independence.
My generous and able tour guide, Tara Deane, in front of the fuel cells that pump hydrogen into their fleet of cars.
Dysfunctional Family Winery – New York clients Nic and Denise sent me a photo after they polished off 3 bottles of the (not yet-released) 2017 Dysfunctional Family “Red Blend” (to be fair, missing from this photo is the rest of their great family who helped in their efforts):
Netflix in Sonoma – A huge surprise to our Sonoma Hyde/Burndale neighborhood (we call it the “Lower-East Side”) was a 9 days-long filming of an episode of Netflix “13 Reasons Why,” which took up the vacant land on three neighboring properties (the main house, as seen in this photo from just over our north fence, was swarming with people and flooded with cherry-picker skylights 24/7, another lot with gear-filled 18-wheelers, toilets, and a giant food tent commissary, and a third lot for dedicated to parking with over 200 cars daily). They routinely stopped traffic to let the vans ferry staff back and forth. Although we all enjoyed watching the process, somehow they managed to obtain a use permit from the County without ever notifying a single neighbor. Especially odd since Hydeout had to notify every neighbor for our very tiny winery use permit.
Vintage Festival Parade – downtown Sonoma was roaring with energy for the annual glow-in-the-dark harvest parade…
Click here to watch a brief video of the Vintage Festival Parade
End of the summer – as the harvest comes to a close, here is a video celebrating the hot air balloons that have been sailing over the Hydeout all summer long: Hot air balloons over Hydeout Sonoma
Hyde/Burndale Lower-East Side neighborhood pot luck. Held just down the street at the Lucchetti Olive Farm, these volunteer Sheriffs paid us a visit, and we really appreciate their patrol efforts here in the countryside…
Sep 28, 2019 | Sonoma, Vineyard, Wine
Sonoma Barn Owls and social tidbits…we’ve lost many grapevines, three years in a row, to damaging gophers. The gopher population is out of whack. Hard to say why? Maybe not enough snakes? We don’t want to use poison or traps, so what’s the better option? Owls! (not interested in Owls? Scroll down for Sonoma social tidbits)
A single owl can eat 155 gophers per year, equal to almost 55 pounds of gophers! Imagine what this family of barn owls will do?
They are nocturnal, hunting mainly at night; this image captured a couple of stealthy killers in broad daylight.
“Wildlife Rescue” from Sonoma County offers an owl box program. We hired them to build and install 3 new owl boxes on the ranch. They have a barn owl program tailored for almost any location – Click: Wildlife Rescue, Sonoma County, Barn Owl Program
Owl box 1 was installed overlooking the house and yard:
Owl box 2 was installed overlooking the vineyard:
Owl box 3 was installed overlooking the hay field:
The official work shirt of Sonoma County BOMP – ‘Barn Owl Maintenance Program’ (shown here with famed owl box installer Mike McGuire).
Mike is establishing the GPS location of each installed box:
And the resulting GPS records look like this. This data gets entered into a database back at the office. And then tracked along with all the other boxes around the County. Hoping the boxes get some new Owl occupants soon:
Recent socializing across the Sonoma Valley…
Vintage Festival – The Valley of the Moon “Vintage Festival” is running this weekend. Click on the video below to see a short clip from last night’s parade which is primarily a series of glow-in-the-dark floats from the Sonoma Valley schools. A great small town tradition…
Video: Vintage Festival “Glow in the Dark” Parade
Harvest: Our first full crop of estate fruit was harvested on Monday. This fruit will be the basis of the ‘yet-to-be-named’ 100% Hydeout estate wine made of 87% Sagrantino, 6% Petite Sirah, 5% Cabernet, and 2% Primitivo. It follows on the heels of its sister wine, the Dysfunctional Family Winery “Red Blend”.
2 tons of the estate fruit blend getting ready for the flatbed truck:
Movie night: Hydeout Sonoma hosted 125 people to an outdoor movie event benefiting the ‘Sonoma International Film Festival’. The film festival is scheduled for next March 25th-29th, 2020. It is my very favorite event of the year in Sonoma; seeing films all day, meeting actors and directors and film buffs, enjoying great wine and food, parties at night, etc. Get tickets here: Sonoma International Film Festival. And here’s a short clip of the film we screened on Friday night, Jonathan Demme’s “Stop Making Sense” by the Talking Heads:
Video: Talking Heads at Hydeout Sonoma
Sonoma Parks: We attended the annual event benefiting the Jack London State Park, and honoring several major Sonoma luminaries, including entertainment and an incredible meal served by honoree and Chef, Ari Weiswasser, of the Glen Ellen Star:
Diana Ferris, Cynthia Wornick, Basha Cohen, and Lynn Goodman (cocktails locked and loaded)
Video: Jack London State Park event
Closer to home: Cynthia Wornick is busy prepping ‘Early Girl’ tomatoes from the Hydeout gardens; her 13th batch of tomato sauce (much of which has been sent to the freezer where it will re-emerge during the winter as a delicious memory of the summer 2019)
In the winery (part 1): Doing it the old fashion way, making sure a client’s precious fruit is carefully ‘macerated’ by the gentle action of human feet before the fermentation begins. Don’t laugh, this really is a great tried-and-true way to break up the grape skins (and release color and flavor) without breaking the grape seeds (which can release objectionable tannins into the wine). And yes, we washed my legs and feet thoroughly with citric acid. This approach works especially well for small quantities of fruit such as this half-ton bin of Sonoma Valley Syrah and Cabernet Franc (with a small proportion of very aromatic Muscat Canelli tossed in)..
In the winery (Part 2): New York City clients with family and friends celebrating the 2019 harvest and tasting the 2018 from barrels…
Bad Company concert at Silverado: It was a surprisingly energetic hard-rocking show. Here are a couple of videos…
Video: Bad Co.
Video: Shooting Star
Thanks for following these blog posts. Please let me hear from you…
Ken Wornick, http://www.hydeoutsonoma.com
Sep 7, 2019 | Wine
Two terrific Sonoma movie events for your calendar:
- On Sept 20th at 6:30pm at the Hydeout Sonoma ranch, benefiting the Sonoma Int’l Film Festival, enjoy an outdoor under-the-stars showing of Jonathan Demme’s “Stop Making Sense”. Bring lawn chairs and blankets. Carpool if you can. Limited to 75 tickets. May already be sold out as of this posting. Get tickets here: Tickets to “Stop Making Sense” at Hydeout Sonoma
- On Sept 26th at 7:00pm at the Sebastiani Theatre in downtown Sonoma, the new and improved 2nd world premiere of Tiny Vineyards by noted documentarian Joe Daniel, featuring an entertainingly close-up view of a dozen Sonoma home winemakers, with several cameos by yours truly, grape grower and winemaker Ken Wornick of Hydeout Sonoma Consulting. Ticket includes a free wine tasting with home winemakers after the film. We’ll be pouring too, the just-bottled 2017 vintage of our Dysfunctional Family Winery “Red Blend” (32% Cabernet, 29% Petite Sirah, 25% Syrah, 14% Merlot) Get tickets here:
Tickets to “Tiny Vineyards” at Sebastiani Theatre
Sep 2, 2019 | Wine
As the clock clicks down to another harvest, it’s time to make some room in the winery. Here are a series of short videos and time lapses of our most recent bottling of Dysfunctional Family 2017 “Red Blend”.
Starting with some barrels full of the wine:
Seven short bottling videos to view in sequence:
conveying clean bottles and flushing with inert gas
filling bottles with the red blend
put a cork in it!
add a nice matte black capsule
apply labels to bottles
bottling is complete
time lapse of the bottling line
time lapse viewed from a catwalk above the bottling line
Federal law requires that we check the fill level to assure every bottle meets/exceeds 750ml. This device assures that level of accuracy.
The first case off the line of 2017 Dysfunctional Family Winery “Red Blend”
The 2017 Dysfunctional Family Red Blend labels:
Hillside Cabernet vineyard on Sonoma Mountain waiting to harvest, brix as of September 2nd were around 18 (+/- 1.5) heading toward 24-26.
Squeezing in the annual ‘trimming of the palms’ before harvest…
chainsaw trimming the Canary palm
Canary palm all cleaned up, with the Hydeout Sagrantino ripening in the background…
Event: Sonoma International Film Festival ‘outdoor movie event’ at the Hydeout
Friday, September 20th, Jonathan Demme’s Stop Making Sense
Buy tickets to 9/20 showing of “Stop Making Sense” at the Hydeout
Jul 20, 2019 | Sonoma, Vineyard, Wine
I will soon be sharing images of the re-construction of an iconic Cabernet vineyard in the next blog post. But while we wait for the newly planted vines to grow, please enjoy this short sampling…
This is the project we’ve been working on all summer, with old vine Zinfandel and new Petite Sirah and the recently planted new Cabernet block. What a view into the town of Sonoma and down into the bay.
And this is the ‘before’ picture. Steep slope, boulders, rocks, red volcanic soil. Someday, this new Cabernet block will look just as spectacular and produce a gorgeous Sonoma Cabernet.
It is really hard work to dig the vine holes in the heat and on rocky terrain.
This is what a bundle of new Cabernet grapevines look like. They are “dormant benchgrafts”, sound asleep, fresh out of the cooler. More on that another time.
The vine tag indicates the variety is Cabernet Sauvignon, clone is UC Davis Foundation Plant Services clone 30.1 (the famed Disney Silverado clone) with rootstock 110R (very drought tolerant).
A protective grow-tube is placed around the plant. And the water flows. A great sense of relief.
In ten short days, the vine has sprung to life!
And in twenty days the new vine has pushed out of the grow tube reaching for the sun. And another iconic Sonoma Cabernet vineyard begins it’s life, soon to be delicious wine at your next meal.
Bonus Round! KSVY Sonoma radio, you made it this far. Now for the fun stuff…
Am I on the air?
From left to right, the infamous Sonoman Simon Blattner, special guest Ken Wornick (yours truly) and smooth operator and radio host Rick Wynne enjoying a commercial break during “The Morning Show” on 91.3 KSVY Sonoma.
You can listen right now to the ‘grapes and wine’ segment of “The Morning Show” Click here and go to minute 26
Hydeout Sonoma and Dysfunctional Family Winery attended the annual Sonoma Valley Vintner’s and Growers annual member’s BBQ and “launch the harvest bell ringing”. Had a great time visiting with our fellow vintners Muscardini (Michael and Kate), Landmark Cellars (Tom and Michelle Rouse), Nun’s Canyon (Kimberly Hughes), Beltane Ranch (Lauren Benward Krause), and the incomparable Sondra Bernstein.
Click here for an 8-second video of Sonoma Grower’s Harvest BBQ
Snakes are a rare sighting but sometimes the swallow something large (see the swollen middle) and cannot move off. In which case, they become the focus of much conversation and observation. The camouflage is amazing, right?
Back home at the Hydeout Sonoma ranch, summer is veggie time. But that new Cabernet vineyard project kept us busy. Forgot all about these carrots. A wheel barrow and a trash can full! Turned them into a delicious carrot soup.
That’s all for now. Stay tuned for more blog postings on the world of grapes and wine.
Jun 15, 2019 | Wine
For over 20 vintages, I have been a loyal customer of Ganau America, a cork company based in Italy, with natural cork sourced from Sardinia and Portugal. Join me on a pictorial journey through their impressive Sonoma processing facility…
The cork arrives in bundles stacked on pallets. Each bundle contains 5,000 raw corks from Europe. The white bundles are from Sardinia, the beige bundles are from Portugal. The bundles are shipped in food-grade controlled conditions. Click here to watch a brief video of the warehouse:
Video: Ganau warehouse
From each bundle, several hundred corks are removed and sent to the Ganau internal lab for testing. The most common problem is TCA taint, a naturally occurring and rather common chemical that causes wine in bottles to become “corked.” TCA is “2,4,6-trichloroanisole,” essentially anisoles with some Chlorine molecules attached. TCA comes from microorganisms found in nature on almost all damp woody material.
Not long ago, most wineries sterilized buildings and machinery with chlorine-based compounds, unwittingly introducing TCA to entire tanks of wine. Now more is know about this process, and most wineries completely restrict potential chlorine-based sources.
“Corked” wines smell and taste of damp, soggy, wet or rotten cardboard. In small amounts, cork taint is non-detectable, but in larger amounts, in the range above 20 parts per million, cork taint dulls the fruit in a wine, renders it lackluster, and cuts the finish. If TCA is found, the entire bundle is re-processed or disposed. Click here to watch a brief video of the lab:
Video: Ganau lab
In some cases, the customer prefers a custom sorting process, as in the photo above, and this video:
Video: Ganau hand sorting
Raw corks can also be sorted using this sophisticated laser-sorting device which grades and separates corks: Click here for a video of the laser sorting process:
Video: Ganau laser sorting
Perhaps the most interesting of all processing steps, here the corks are lightning-fast “laser engraved” with a winery logo. Click here for a video:
Video: Ganau laser engraving
After arrival, sorting, and engraving, the corks are given a brief bath in a light lubricant solution which assists the cork to slide into the bottle during the bottling process. Click here for a brief video:
Video: Ganau cork lubricant
The last step before packing and shipping is either drying or humidifying, depending on the weather in the facility and the moisture content in the corks after processing. Here the corks are being dried slightly in ambient air toward the target of 4-6% moisture content.
Kerry Smith King, our Ganau sales agent for nearly 20 years. When we first met, I was in the early stages of developing La Honda Winery in Redwood City. And many years later Ganau and Kerry are supplying corks for our new Sonoma wine brands – Dysfunctional Family, Localita, Sovare, and many other client wine brands we are bringing to market. In 2020, we’ll be exclusively using Ganau’s Italian ‘Sardinian’ cork for the introduction of our estate Sagrantino, our Sonoma red grapevines originally from historic Perugia Umbria in Italy.
For this visit to the Ganau plant, I dug through old T-shirts and found this somewhat iconic version from 2003 – it says “Ganau – Italian for cork” and thus the title of this blog post.
Readers who made it this far…bonus round!
Helping me with some blending trails for the 2017 Dysfunctional Family Sonoma Valley Red Wine Blend to be bottled in August, our consulting partner Bill Knuttel (a legend in our industry – Saintsbury, Chalk Hill, Dry Creek) applies his 30 years of expertise blending various proportions of Cabernet, Merlot, Syrah, and Petite Sirah. If the final blend hits just the right note, Bill might jump up and grab the keyboard behind him and play “Smoke on the Water” by Deep Purple.
The 2017 Dysfunctional Family Sonoma Valley Red Wine Blend will be bottled in August and released just before Thanksgiving.
Warmly – Ken Wornick
