If you like this podcast, please be sure to rate us 5 stars in Apple podcasts and like our videos on YouTube.  Sorry for the misfire - harvest got me out of practice!

Episode 0024:

Wine Reads – November 18, 2021

Welcome back to Viti+Culture, and welcome to season 2.  It’s been a few weeks since our last podcast, but here we are, rested and ready to deliver some great content.  Harvest is finally over, a few fermentations remain bubbling away, the cellar is cleaned, our equipment is winterized, and we are moving into our next phase of cellar work - stabalizing and bottling sparkling wine, preparing to bottle our early release wines like our Cabernet Franc Rose, our White Merlot, and some of our Chenin Blanc, and finally disgorging some of our sparkling wines, such as our 2017 and 2019 Chardonnay based Blanc de Blanc, and Chenin Blanc.  I’ll keep you updated as to what winemakers are experiencing in the cellar as we move forward with season, and key you in to some of the winemaking decisions we have along the way.

We are also launching a new segment - Wine Reads - where we choose an article from the world of written content on wine, read it on the show, and share our thoughts and opinions on the topic.  If you’re a wine writer, feel free to forward me an article for consideration at viticulturepodcast@gmail.com.  I’m happy to look it over, and maybe even discuss it with you on the show.  We will continue to produce and publish our long-form interviews on YouTube, but some of the shorter content will be podcast and Substack only, so make sure you’ve clicked subscribe in your favorite podcast platform, and sign up to our Substack newsletter.  

For our first Wine Read, I figured I’d actually reflect on the 2021 vintage by reading the letter I’m preparing to send out to our Missick Cellars Wine Club.  I’m excited to be shipping out the first Finger Lakes produced Sparkling Chenin Blanc with that shipment, as well as some other really cool small lot wines, but I also generally engage with our members by sharing some of my deepest thoughts, and letting them know what is going on in the cellar.  Here’s a sneak preview of the vintage, an audio taste of our wine club, and a survey of what the final tally of the 2021 vintage felt like. 

Remember, if you like this podcast, please be sure to rate us 5 stars in Apple podcasts and like our videos on YouTube.  It really helps with the ratings and in introducing new folks to the show.  Be sure to tune in next week, where I speak with Phil Plummer, winemaker at Montezuma, Idol Ridge, and Fossenvue wineries.  Phil embraces the ethos of our show, those of the philosopher-maker, and intertwines culture, art, history, and music in some subtle, and not so subtle ways, into each of his wines.   

So, here we go, our 2021 Missick Cellars Wine Club Newsletter:

Dear Wine Club Member,                                                        

When I was deployed as a soldier in the Army with Operation Iraqi Freedom, every few months we were able to take an R&R day, and head down to the large U.S. base in Kuwait on the coast of the Persian Gulf called Camp Doha.  Camp Doha had a PX (post exchange) that was both sized and filled with the inventory of a Super Walmart.  It was where we could stock up on nearly everything we needed, or wanted, to get us through the long weeks back at our small desert outposts.  

Camp Doha also had a Starbucks and a Burger King, all of which brought a sense of normalcy, but also a little bit of cognitive dissonance.  I remember browsing those location oriented Starbucks mugs while waiting in line that list the city you are in, and looking at the one with Kuwait City and the skyline depicted.  I wish I would have bought one as a memento.  The pearl of Camp Doha in those days however, was a place called the Marble Palace.  It was a short bus ride from camp, and had a large recreational pool adjacent to the Gulf, there were therapeutic masseuses, and in many ways, offered everything you could find at a luxury resort.  It was, for a day, potentially overnight if you had some other business to attend to, a respite from the dusty tents we slept in, the day to day monotony of my job as a Signal Corps non-commissioned officer, guard tower shifts in 110 degree temperatures, and hours spent sitting under the skud bunkers scattered all throughout my home camp with a battle buddy, talking about home.  

Harvest certainly does not carry the emotional intensity or gravity of deployment, I would not sell our servicemembers short by drawing a straight line between the experience of deployment and the intensity of the harvest or the crush pad.  There are analogies though, and in many ways, the pace of harvest rarely allows for the periods of pause and contemplation that a deployment permits.  Nonetheless, as harvest approaches, the mind prepares for what you know will be extremely long days, endless physicality, isolation from family and friends (outside the wine industry), discomfort, and exhaustion.  Similarly, it provides a purpose, a mission, with goals that must be accomplished, in specific periods of time with little room for error.  The elements of weather, of available resources, the risk of physical danger around powerful equipment if you’re careless or thoughtless, and the knowledge that there is an end date, all provide a very similar psychological framework to that the soldier experiences.  You have set out on a path, the end goal is known, there will be surprises and challenges, but at the end of this period, victory is in sight.

I recalled my time at the Marble Palace, a place I hadn’t thought about in years, after returning home for the first time in what felt like weeks (though it had only been a few days), to spend an entire day and night with my family.  It was mid-October, about half-way through crush, and having the chance to push Andrew and Audrey on the swing-set in the backyard, sharing dinner at the table with the family, and having my wife Laure massage my shoulders that night made home feel like the R&R I had been craving.  I particularly enjoy pairing our wines with meals during harvest.  It puts a perspective on the hard work we are presently enmeshed in, and opening the time capsules of vintages past during dinner with the family, ties moments of our past to moments of the present, even as we all sacrifice and work for the future that is gurgling away through its fermentation in the cellar.   

Perhaps the moments from my deployment were fresh with me this year after what we witnessed in Afghanistan in August, and during which I spent countless hours speaking with other veterans and checking in on friends that I knew had spent years of their life in that country.  Perhaps it was because we were shorter on cellar staff this year than in years’ past, placing extra burdens and extra work on myself and my assistant.  Maybe it was simply because I see my children growing so fast and am realizing how quickly time goes with every year we gather around the table to watch them blow out that additional candle on the cake.  And finally, it may have been because this was such a difficult harvest, where extra vineyard work coupled with crucial picking decisions dictated the quality of the wine that was made, and with our first year of a significant harvest from our estate vineyard, I felt an enormous amount of pressure to deliver the best possible effort to everyone who enjoys our wine.  

2021 was our most difficult vintage since 2018.  As with 2018, moisture was the catalyst for a lot of stress on vineyard crews this vintage.  The heavy rainfall, high temperatures, and high dewpoints which kept vineyard canopies and clusters too wet for too long in 2018, had analogs for all of us who farm grapes in the Finger Lakes this year.  Granted, temperatures were not as high as three years ago, and dewpoints were not as deleterious, the rain proved a difficulty that we had to navigate around.  There were indeed some much needed breaks, three or four days here, maybe a week there, but from August through the end of October, the rain fell, and we needed to be cognizant of when it was falling.

Though 2021 wasn’t our largest harvest, between our own wines and some custom crush projects, we processed nearly 70 tons of fruit, with about 6 tons coming from our own vineyard.  We managed an incredibly clean harvest of Chenin Blanc, Riesling and Cabernet Franc, with multiple passes in the Riesling in order to produce some different styles of estate wines, from sparkling to still.  Our vineyard, planted in 2019, is in what is called its third leaf, in other words, its third growing season.  The third leaf is generally when you can expect to get your first real crop, with an expansion of yield occurring in the following vintages.  Of course, yield is not the most important aspect.  The vineyard must be balanced, producing enough fruit to match the energy output of the vine, but not so much that you stress the vine or dilute the concentration of flavors that a vineyard can deliver.

In addition, we worked with our traditional growing partners at Gibson Vineyard and Morris Vineyard, to bring in varietals like Seyval Blanc, Chenin Blanc, Chardonnay, Riesling, Merlot, Cabernet Franc, Valvin Muscat, and some other hybrids that will go into our Foreword series.  

Although we have a significant amount of wine still fermenting, I must share with you that I am more proud of this vintage than nearly any in the last 10 years.  There are vintages that naturally make great wines.  The weather is perfect from April to November, harvest happens on your schedule and not based on the risk of rain, and every piece of equipment cooperates fully with no downtime or repairs required.  I think of vintages like 2012, 2016, and 2020, where a wi