Nov 16, 2019 | Wine
The last ton of grapes is safely in the winery, and in celebration of the end of the 2019 harvest Hydeout Sonoma hosted a BBQ lunch for the whole hard-working winery team. The joke is that ‘it takes a lot of beer to make good wine’, and in this case, yes, guilty as charged. That, and many many hamburgers. In the featured cover photo, from left to right – Señors Altuve, Edgardo, Ricardo, Jose, Rex, Miguel, Ken, and Sebastian.
Quick flashback to July 2019 – the start of the harvest and the celebratory Sonoma Valley Vintners and Growers dinner at Donum Winery in Carneros.
Grape harvest – cover crop seed
Once the harvests are completed, and winemaking chores are put to bed, it’s time to spread cover crop seed in the vineyard. We do this to secure the precious soil from runoff and add nutrition, break down clay, provide nematode suppression, and add beauty. Here in the back of our Polaris Ranger are a couple of 50 pound bags of “Brassica mix” – 40% Nemagon mustard, 30% common mustard, 15% Canola, and 15% daikon radish. This fast growing cover crop has the ability to produce up to 4 tons of bio-matter per acre!
Then just like clockwork, it’s time to start harvesting the ripe olives for oil. Cynthia and Martin start the long hard process of hand-harvesting.
Here I am up in the olive tree getting the last fruit from the top of the tree.
Fog over head, still early in the morning and just getting started, we examine the fruit for quality and celebrate being underway. Farming, growing things organically, trying to live somewhat off the land, all a real pleasure.
All done, about 500 pounds, equals about 7 gallons of extra virgin oil.
Delivered to Figone’s Olive Oil Company where the Hydeout Sonoma olives will be milled. Here, Cynthia and Zan.
Olives loaded into the hopper, then cleaned and ready for the mill. Proprietor Frank Figone met us at the loading dock and supervised the press.
Click here for a brief olive oil processing video
The big payoff – the start of a small stream of extra virgin oil exits the press.
The finished product – 4.3 gallons of extra virgin olive oil…
For more information – Click here to visit the Figone Olive Oil website
Figone’s is a great place to shop, in person or online, for delicious authentic olive oil products!
And in other Hydeout Sonoma Farms and Dysfunctional Family Winery news…
Our final harvest from the Hydeout Sonoma gardens – the last of the tomatoes and peppers, these are mainly Early Girl, Better Boy, and Roma tomatoes along with Shishito and Padron peppers.
Ripening Persimmon – colorful, and famously packed with lots of vitamin C. Just in time to prevent winter colds.
After the grape and olives and garden harvests, it’s time for a little fun – a game Jenga ends in a pile of blocks – with Paige Locke, Gail Diserens, Cynthia Wornick, and Elaine Smith looking on.
Finally, some time off – heading down the coast on Highway One from Sonoma on our way to Los Angeles.
And 5 days later we turned north and pointed the bike towards Death Valley (see the sign).
As the weather cools, our estate Sagrantino vineyard shows off its fall colors…two chemicals are responsible for the fall coloration of leaves, carotenoids create orange and yellow pigments, and anthocyanins create shades of red and purple. The carotenoids are present in the leaf all summer long, but they’re masked by the green of chlorophyll.
…the harvest moon rises over Sonoma Valley.
Wishing everyone a wonderful Thanksgiving holiday. Despite what seems like turmoil everywhere, the great majority of us are blessed with ample food, clothing, shelter, and love. And for those that are not, we are all doing our best to help. Thank goodness we are not living in a time of widespread famine and disease. Let’s celebrate all that is good. Warmly. Ken
www.hydeoutsonoma.com
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.
