One of the best parts of our job is that we are required to drive to beautiful places and meet interesting people in order to produce incredible wine.  At Donelan, we are primarily concerned with finding a tremendous site, period.  We will worry afterward whether it is in a convenient AVA, easy to get to, etc.

Perli Vineyard Pinot Noir represents such a search and has everything we look for in a vineyard.  Oh, and it is farmed in the coastal mountain wilderness of southern Mendocino County.  Rocks? Check. Wind? Check. Cool Temerpatures? Check.  Committed grower whose over arching desire to create on of the best vineayrds in all of California? You bet!

We have been working with Perli Vineyard for a few vintages and a recent visit reiterated one of the unique properties of this site: it is wilderness.  Bears, boars, and all sorts of unusual “pests” grace the vineyard and provide their own set of unique challenges.  What we know is that the red, quartz filled soil produces a uniquely flavored Pinot Noir that at once seems Oregonian and Californian in its ethos.  It is the core of the Two Brothers Pinot Noir and you should give it a try.  Join our community for free to purchase or let us know when you are in Sonoma County and come by to try the 2011 Perli Pinot Noir directly from barrel.  Enjoy!

We have noted previously how we identify great sites for making terrific wine.  One important element in this land of sunshine and dry weather?  Wind.  For many decades it was difficult for vine researchers to distinguish the impact of sun vs. heat.  You see, a dark grape receiving direct sunlight in the middle of the day can be as much as 30 degrees warmer than ambient air temperatures.  So was it more sunlight, or warmer berries that increased your color?

Then in 2000 a study was published that used heated and cooled air flow to alter the temperature of grape berries without altering their sun exposure.  The air passing over the grapes dampened high temperatures.  Now, imagine yourself sleeveless on a sunny summer day, perhaps some perspiration on your arms but sipping some wonderful Syrah.  Will you be cooler with a breeze, or without?  It is breezes like in the video below occurring nearly every afternoon at Obsidian Vineyard that we believe allow us to make a floral, savory, cherry laden Syrah that tastes of something from a cooler climate than one would otherwise suspect from this vineyard.  Obsidian is consistently one of our top rated Syrah; it is an old vine vineyard, rocky, burly, extremely low yielding, and breezy.  And we know those breezes, even with full sun, will decrease the temperature experienced by those grapes – altering their physiology.  It is another cog in the mystery of terroir.  Join Donelan if you’d like to try some of the inimitable Obsidian Syrah.

It is Spring!  And there is no time better than now to begin drinking the Donelan Venus in earnest.  The 2010 was just released, please enjoy this description from our winemaker Tyler Thomas of how Venus is produced and click here to find out more.

http://www.donelanwines.com/w_d_venus09.html

This assessment is difficult.  After all people suggest it is a long game of brand building and I am inclined to agree.  While it is tempting to desire results – in terms of sales – right away, this isn’t fair or realistic.  It also presumes you are using social media correctly, which may not be true!  As I have stated before our goal is to use different media as tools to communicate and engage with our customers: one of Joe Donelan’s overarching passions for this business.

With all this swirling in my mind recently I read the American Association of Wine Economists working paper number 98.  The thrust of the article is about personal bias in a wine guide’s quality evaluation.  But what caught my eye really didn’t have anything to do with personal bias.  In the introduction the authors were making a case that wine guides have arisen to act like ratings agencies aiding a buyer in sifting through the myriad of wineries: reasonable enough.  In doing this they speak of “information asymmetry between the producer, who followed each step of the production process and the consumer. In extreme cases this [information asymmetry] can prevent…buying.”

Information asymmetry, what a great cryptic phrase like a good academic phrase ought to be.  What exactly does it mean?  As a producer I see it as an indictment on the industry’s poor ability to develop and share a story.  Before the recent changes in how information spread, it was more difficult to educate every consumer on every aspect of the process.  As I have noted, we relied much more heavily on retailers to do the educating, and – as the AAWE article points out – wine publications.

The comment also seems pregnant with the implication that producers take way too much for granted about what people know, and what they don’t know about the brand.  We are poor educators, perhaps because we are poor learners – but that is another topic.  What does all this have to do with social media and wine blogging?  Well, not only do blogs and social tools help us engage in more ways than ever with our customers, but it offers the opportunity to create better symmetry of information.  We have more avenues than ever before to provide our fans with information about our wine, our vineyards, and more importantly, our stories.

And the content doesn’t appear before their eyes and go away.  It is searchable, reference-able, and can help you connect with the increasingly important third party validator of your great wine.  It makes your story much more accessible not only for those who are using Google to discover you and wine, but it also makes your story incredibly available – and easily so – for those who influence the perception of your great stuff.  Finally, it helps turn what might otherwise have been a one way street, into something more akin to a two way street.  In other words, it is easier to correct information asymmetry when you are dialoguing with your customers.

Information asymmetry can be rebalanced to some degree with social media because of the easier ability to create digestible content.  However one will still need to “distribute” that content much like the wine we produce.  As a result, the winery blog cannot replace the need for “others” (wine publications and the newer wine multi-media members) to understand and share our story.  Those relationships must be cultivated, but the internet provides a wonderful tool to define the story that is distributed.

Want to find out what a wine grape harvest really is?  Follow our intern, Sarah Green, as she chronicles her experience as a first time cellar rat.  This entry highlights the close of her new perspective as she navigates a large winery experience.

At my new winery adventure, let’s call it Big Winery Land, the tops of tanks are like peaks offering views of all of Hastings.  They are that big and the view from up there is amazing.

I’m settling in from my transition from Donelan (Tiny Winery Land) and things are starting to feel normal, whatever that means. At the end of a rigorous day in the cellar, I am fairly destroyed.  The other day I spent a couple of hours first thing taking down temperature and dissolved oxygen measurements on about twenty tanks.  Then I spent a couple more hours pressure washing (“wahter-blahsting,” the Kiwis say) the crush pad, climbing endlessly in and out of the 10-ton hopper and up and down “the pit,” where the destemmer lurks like a beast in a medieval torture chamber.

Then I cleaned tanks and fixed lines.

A word on cleaning here in Big Winery Land. Once upon a time in Tiny Winery Land, I was part of a concerted effort to conserve water. We collected the run-off and used only one process (ie, water, green cleaning solution, water). This was all non-toxic and fairly efficient.

Now I’m working with industry-standard cleaning procedures that are more noxious and wasteful. It takes FOUR 50-gallon buckets of water to clean one tank. A first bucket conveys the caustic solution – a granulated substance dissolved in water. The stuff is vile – a corrosive alkali. A whiff of it makes you gag. If you get it on your skin, it feels like slimy soap you can’t wash off, as the base literally turns your skin cells to soap. It kills EVERYTHING, which is why wineries like it.

Caustic must be flushed out with a second bucket of water and followed with a third bucket containing a sulphur-citric acid solution, which neutralizes the caustic. We sometimes used sulphur at Donelan for sanitizing. Here, it’s the necessary third step in cleaning anything. It, too, can make you gag and cough, your eyes stinging and watering. The sulphur-citric gets flushed out with a fourth bucket of clean water.

The process is time and water consuming. Obviously with tanks this big, even a basic rinse requires far more water than the comparatively small tanks at Donelan did. But it still makes me cringe when I watch 200 gallons slink down the drain each time a tank needs cleaning.

And a word on fixed lines, another feature of Big Winery Land. These are metal pipes that criss-cross the whole cellar. You can hook wine into a fixed line in one part of the winery and pump it somewhere else – somewhere that you likely can’t even see. These lines run all over the crush pad; soon, they’ll be pumping fruit right out of the destemmer and straight into fermentation tanks and presses. I find this basically awesome. But also a little unnerving – what if something is going horribly wrong and you don’t even know until you discover 10 tons of fruit in a pile on the floor??

Which is unlikely. But still. Just another reason to not to screw up.

Whether in Big Winery Land or Tiny Winery Land it is all about perspective. Every task can seem more or less difficult or pleasant than another, for reasons you always forget until you’re knee deep in it. Every cellar presents its own gifts and nightmares compared to what you’ve experienced. I take special pleasure in the sloped floors (the beauty of drainage!) and the built-in hose-fittings – no more faffing about with infinite Tri-Clover clamps and gaskets.

And other things can be frustrating, as expected. I try not to judge too harshly given that different approaches are valid and instructive. And while I feel like less of a moron in the cellar than I once did, I’m still basically a moron, and what the hell do I know. It all makes for animated cellar-geek conversation.

Little victories keep me going – I’ve got my one-handed barrel roll down solidly – and for everything else, there’s just enough self-hatred, camaraderie, and beers on the porch to take the edge off.

Join the Donelan Community

Sarah Green is NO LONGER a wine industry newbie, grew up in Southern California, attended Smith College in the northeast, and joined Donelan Wines for the 2011 harvest.  Track more of her thoughts on her shared blog Crushed and Stirred.

© Sarah Green

Quality to Donelan means we try to do everything well, including our conservation.

It is frost season and in the morning you can see overhead sprinklers running all over the valley to protect swollen buds from damage.  Water use in California is a hot button topic and the wine industry will play a critical role.  Local growers within the Russian River watershed of Mendocino and Sonoma counties filed a lawsuit against the State Water Resources Control Board (SWRCB) last October because of an unprecedented regulation targeting winegrape growers’ use of water for frost protection purposes.

Water use has engendered tension for ages and according to an American Intelligence Community report problems with water could destabilize several regions across the globe in the next decade.  One thing is for sure, with growing populations and ever growing needs for water, improved efficiency in water use is a must.  I’ll leave the frost protection debate for lawyers, but there are steps we can take – and indeed that we have been taking – to improve the quality of our stewardship each year.  And in our minds, quality stewardship is a part of producing quality wines.

We are always open to exploring new ways to improve the stewardship of our resources.  We work with growers to move toward organic farming, and limiting water use.  Since 2008 we have dramatically reduced the amount of water used in the vineyards and we hope to continue to do so with the help of better physiological monitoring of the vine.  Water is such a key resource in California and is critical to plant physiology.  Thankfully wine grapes use less water than most agricultural crops and as high quality growers we know that limiting water improves quality of the finished wine (if it also decreases quantity).  We’ve seen significant gains with Syrah quality when vines are pushed to the brink of their hydro-limits.

However once grapes are received, good cellar practice often employs a healthy amount of water primarily for cleaning and sanitizing equipment.  As a producer who practices adding as little as possible to each set of grapes, the need to have spotless equipment is even more important as the microbial risks increase with native fermentations, higher pH juice, and long aging.  The challenge is twofold: amount of water and chemical effluent leaving the winery.

Since 2008 our water use has declined even though our cleanliness has improved significantly.  In fact our year to date total declined 35% from 2010 to 2011 for the same production level.  We have found that the number one factor to reducing water use is cultivating an attitude toward water that encourages everyone to approach its use less flippantly.

However beginning in 2009 we searched for more, there must be a way to maintain our cellar standards for cleanliness but also reduce water use further and rid ourselves of chemicals that could impact the health risk to our employees.

With quality as our chief goal, we believe quality should be applied ubiquitously in all aspects of our business.  In our search for healthy cleaning products that could save water we discovered WISE solutions.  WISE Solutions has options not only for our cleaning protocols, but also for our lubricants and oils that we use on equipment like sorting tables and forklifts.

Most winery practices include at least 3 rinses: prerinse, cleaning chemical with rinse, then a sanitizer with another rinse.  With the WISE product we were able to eliminate one of the three rinses completely.  Over the course of harvest this quickly adds up to a significant change in water use.  WISE allowed fewer steps, but did not necessarily save us time.  Changes in the cleaning protocol were required to achieve the same results, but this was a small price to pay to improve our conservation and quality of health to our employees.  Being chemical free there is little risk to cellar employees and its odor is far from noxious, improving both skin and lung exposure to chemicals.

The combination of sustainable attitude with improved chemicals has significantly reduced our water use.  It has not exactly been easier, as we have had to alter the physical work associated with the sanitizing protocols, but the results speak for themselves: we are using far less water per liter of wine than we ever have.  And with the increasingly central role of water in agriculture, we can open a bottle with that much more confidence in the totality of the quality of production.

It is frost season and this past week has seen some cold mornings.  While I don’t like to see all the water used to protect grapevines from frost, it does make for some great scenery as I drive to work.  You might wonder how it is water works to protect your grapevine shoots from frost damage?  The answer: latent heat of fusion.

What the heck is that?  To put it simply, as water freezes, it releases heat, and that energy that is leaving the water can “warm” the immediately surrounding area.  All of this can keep plant tissue just above the temperature that damage may occur.  Seems paradoxical, but really its just physics!

Lamb and Syrah are nearly as epic of a combination as Lamb and Easter.  So if you plan on the latter this Easter weekend, why not combine it with the former.  I asked Chris Donelan, of Cuvee Christine fame, to provide me a family recipe for lamb that I could try with my folks who were in town recently.  I went to Chris because I have experienced her hospitality and cooking on numerous occasions and have a fondness for the simplicity with which she creates high quality meals.

The following recipe is no exception though it does require – as always I suppose – high quality ingredients.  This roast lamb can be done in the broiler, though we grilled ours with a touch of mesquite charcoal added to our normal briquettes.  As for side, go with what you like.  We are on the tail end of beet season and had beets tossed with salt, pepper, olive oil, and a touch of lemon along with green salad, cheese, and crunchy bread (grilled).  The lamb is so good that whatever you serve with it is truly going to be only a complement, so compliment it with something nice, fresh, and Eastery.

As I mentioned in our risotto recipe, what makes great recipes great are their reliance on good ingredients and flexible parameters.  This is such a recipe.  Chris finely chops her rub and coats it with olive oil, I pounded mine with a mortar and pestle and made a wet paste to coat the chops.  The point is not the technique per se, but the right combination of ingredients to balance the gamey, meaty characters of the lamb.  Use herbs you enjoy, but this fresh rosemary with salt and pepper really allows the Lamb to shine!

As for the lamb, I bought a rack and had the butcher simply cut the pieces – bone in – to make approximately 1.25 inch lamb chops.  I prefer these to what is often sold as “lamb chop” at the grocery store, but it probably doesn’t’ make that big of a difference.

Grilled Lamb Chop with Rosemary and Garlic, serves ~ 6

6 Tbls olive oil
1 head of garlic, minced
2-3 Tbls minced fresh Rosemary
1 Tbls kosher salt
1/4 tsp fresh-ground black pepper
8 lamb rib chops, about 1 inch thick (about 2 3/4 lbs in all)

Light the grill or heat the broiler. In a shallow dish, combine 4 tablespoons of the oil with the garlic, rosemary, salt, and pepper. Add the lamb chops and turn to coat.

Grill over high heat or broil the lamb chops for approximately 3-5 minutes, basting with the remaining 2 tablespoons oil.  Turn and cook until done, about 3-5 minutes longer.

When I had this dish last week with my family we enjoyed a 2008 Cuvee Christine which was a fantastic combination.  However you cannot go wrong with the Richards Family Vineyard Syrah either, with its lavender and herb notes adding to the dark fruit, it works well with rosemary encrusted lamb.  Enjoy!

Let us know how it turned out for you and join the Donelan Community.