I can hardly believe it is September and Labor Day Weekend.  First, the details for this weekend.  We want all you wine tasters to unite and demand a barrel taste of our 2009 Pinot Noir.  We think it is already as fruity as our award-winning 2008 Pinot!  We’ll be serving all of our wines, of course, and little bites of our luscious chocolate cake – the same recipe we served at our wedding and at the incredible wedding we had here last weekend.

NOON – 5 PM FRIDAY, SATURDAY, SUNDAY AND MONDAY! 

5195 SW Hergert Road, Cornelius OR (Yes, Cornelius. Really.)

503-992-1196.  Directions on the bar at the left. Or call. 

It’s going to be a beautiful weekend.  Plan to sit on our patio and marvel with us at how gorgeous a spot this is….

Okay, so it’s been a busy month …. After the early spring that brought growth to the vineyard about three weeks early, June was cold and wet.  People’s moods were sulky.  The grapes were under the wrong kind of stress.  Then the sun came out right after July 4th (we watched fireworks at a friend’s house from our car because it was so cold) and shoots grew so fast the vines looked a little like Alice the Goons…. 

A solid month of truly lovely weather has kept Jim and David and Georgia up in the vineyard trying to stay ahead of the growth.  Plus, the oat hay Jim planted for the horses hit its prime and needed to be cut, raked, baled and moved to the barn – all 1475 bales!  Luckily, this year, the baler worked the whole job through.

The vineyard looks gorgeous and the horses are happy.   We’ve got our signs up on the road and people are finding their way to the Tasting Room on weekends so we have plenty of company and lots of interesting conversations.   Wish I actually had time to remember all of the things we talk about!  And I meet equally fascinating people at the Hillsboro Tuesday Market where I pour wines each week from 5 – 8:30 PM.

So, what I really wanted to write about was how the grapes are grown here.  It’s pretty fascinating and I have learned from people in our tasting room that the more they know about the mystery and romance of the vine, the more they enjoy the experience of tasting wines.  Here’s the scoop on how it grows up here on the top of our beautiful hill in Cornelius.

VINEYARD NOTES – Our vineyard is on a southeast-facing slope in the last hills of the Chehalem Mountain range.  Each vine is nestled in windblown, volcanic soil anchored to this basalt range with depths of six to twelve feet.  This rich soil produces grapes lavish in the tastes of the earth and its surrounding micro- climate.  Each vine is coaxed by hand to produce full, compact clusters.

In this unusual microclimate the 480 foot elevation is protected by higher hills on three sides from any coastal storms or harsh weather changes. The sun warms the grapes throughout the day, producing the sugars and flavors into the peak of the afternoon.  The grapes are then cooled by the late afternoon and evening ocean breezes that fan down the Columbia River, skirting the coastal range into this, the northern Willamette Valley.   This daily cycle is repeated throughout the fall until the grapes are picked at their peak of ripeness. 

The vines, trained to a Henry trellis, achieved a critical balance of vine growth to berry growth. The bunches ripened in their time – slowly – to achieve the utmost flavors this unusual microclimate can create.

PRODUCTION NOTES – Jim tends each vine by hand from first pruning in January.  Each grape cluster is scrutinized and selected in the vineyard from veraison through the hand picking process.  Only the best clusters are destined for the fermenting tanks and, for the red wine, their week to ten-day cold-soak sojourn.

Once cold soaking achieves maximum color extraction, fermentation is started to transform the sugars into alcohol.  When complete, less than a week later, the juices are moved into oak barrels to begin a secondary fermentation and aging process.  We use 30% new Oak barrels to achieve an understated balance of oak to fruit taste that gives us our complex and superb fruit-forward taste. Over the next year, the wine is monitored, naturally fined, the barrels are topped weekly and the wine is racked off the lees and finings. The Pinot Noir is then cold stabilized and left to rest and age.

With the white wines, each variety is pressed in whole bunches and the juice transferred into separate stainless tanks on the same day that the grapes are picked. The fermentation process begins immediately and through use of a slow yeast and in a cold fermenting room, the grape juices ferment slowly to maximize the extraction of the fruit flavors. Each wine is left on the lees for a differing amount of time depending upon the settling process. Each wine is then racked, fined, filtered and cold stabilized prior to bottling in late spring/early summer.

And the results are our lovely 2008 award-winning wines – Mingle, the white blend of Pinot Gris, Chardonnay and Riesling; our silver-medal Pinot Noir; and the 2009 whites.  Come and see us in the tasting room on weekends.  And did I mention I was in Chicago for a week at a conference from my day job?  Here’s a picture of me taking a picture of a TV screen built into the mirror in the rest room in the lobby.  I couldn’t get over it….Feel like I should think up a caption for the bubbles over my head….maybe,

And He Slides Into Home Plate  (It’s a mirror…slides…get it?)

We are in a definite celebratory mood around here — it’s been sunny and the vines and grapes are growing and we are happy.  Plus, the medals for our award winning wines arrived this week so we are excited to show them off!

July 4th Weekend – Saturday, Sunday and Monday  noon – 5 PM

The Wine Dogs – Gemini and Trouble – will greet you and escort you to the Tasting Room!

5195 SW Hergert Rd., Cornelius OR 97113

We are serving all of our wines and we’ll throw in strawberries and raspberries for the July 4th festivities.

Here are the wines and the order in which we pour them – as if you were serving them at a dinner party

A BLOOMING HILL VINEYARD                                     

WINEMAKER’S NOTES

- 2008 Mingle – Bronze Award winner – is a blended wine – Pinot Gris, Chardonnay and Riesling.  It has a complex set of flavors, reflecting notes of each of the three wines resulting in a crisp and refreshing wine with tropical fruit flavors.  Mingle loves food.  13.5% alcohol

- 2009 Chardonnay has a clean, crisp, fruity taste with a smooth finish complementing spicy food and a good companion for fish, chicken and many pork dishes. 13.2 % alcohol

- 2009 Pinot Gris is a mild, fruity wine featuring tastes of pear, melon and peach.  Serve this wine with salads, fish, chicken or serve with hors d’oeuvres. 13.1 % alcohol

- 2009 Riesling is a light, balanced semi-sweet wine, with fruit –filled taste; best served with desserts or light luncheons or by itself for those with a sweet-tooth! 10.5% alcohol/2.3% residual sugar

- 2008 Pinot Noir  – Silver Award winner has a superbly fruit forward flavor and gorgeous garnet color, a smooth sensation and long finish. 13.5% alcohol

                                                                                  Holly and Jim

A Blooming Hill Vineyard & Winery

5195 SW Hergert Rd., Cornelius OR         503-992-1196

It’s Memorial Day in Oregon Wine Country and all of our new 2009 Whites are available.  They are wonderful.  Come and see us – directions on the bar at the left – we’ll be serving all of our wines, our wedding chocolate cake and the wine dogs will be here to escort you! (Gemini can read, by the way….we’ll show you.)  Our $5 tasting fee is applied to your puchases.  Here’s what you can expect this weekend:

2009 Riesling is a light, semi-sweet wine with fruit filled taste; best served with desserts or light hundeons or by itself for those with a sweet-tooth! $15 

2009 Pinot Gris – a mild, fruity wine featuing tastes of pear, melon and peach.  Serve this wine with salads, fish, chicken or serve with hors d’oeuvres.  $10

2009 Chardonnay has a clean, creisp, furity taste with a smooth finish complementing spicy food and a good companion for fish, chicken and many pork dishes.  $12

2008 Mingle – a blend of Pinot Gris, Chardonnay and Riesling with complex flavors resulting in a crisp and refreshing wine with tropical fruit flavors.  Mingle loves food! $12 Bronze medal winner 2010 NW Wine Summit

2008 Oregon Wine Awards Outstanding Pinot Noir and Silver Medal winner 2010 NW Wine Summit - a superbly fruit foward flavor and gorgeous garnet color, a smooth sensation and a long finish!  Serve with all foods.  $20

Order directly from us if you can’t make it out this weekend.

www.abloominghillvineyard.com

Sending Out Good Thoughts For A Sunny Weekend

If you have been following the story of Wilbur, our pigeon - here or on Facebook - you saw a reference to a bird I once got drunk on brandy.  A few people wanted the back story so here it is.

A thousand years ago when I was living in Snedens Landing on the Hudnson River and Charlie was four, we were all sitting out in the lovely backyard when a bird flung itself into the glass patio doors.  It was a little bird.  It made a loud smack and then fell to the ground.  I ran over and there was the poor little thing lying there looking done for.  Something made me touch its little soft body and I felt heart beats.  “It’s alive!” was my happy cry, “What should I do?”  I was not then, nor am I particularly now, the outdoors type so birds were either in the zoo, in a cage in my apartment or pigeons walking around the streets of New York dining on discarded prezel pieces and hot dog buns they retrieved from sidewalks.   I once took one I found bleeding on a heating grate to the vet, wrapped up in my cape, but what to do about ones in the wild was not in my skill set.  Not that we lived in the wild; Snedens is a quite sophisticated place only 20 miles from NYC.

Don, my husband then and Charlie’s father, suggested a good idea would be to wring the poor thing’s neck and put it out of its misery.  That was out of the question.  I love birds.  My first pet was a parakeet named Tweetie who could speak (really), ate corners off my homework and fished out the guppies in the fish tank until we discovered that and protected them.   Years later I had a parakeet in an apartment I lived in on West 75th Street who flew out of the window.  It was the former parlor of the brownstone on the second floor in the front.  I was heartbroken.  A week later, I heard a bird chirping in my neighbor’s apartment in the back.  I knocked.  They had found a bird flying in the hallways, captured it in a sheet and taken it in.  It was my bird!  Reunited, I bought two more.  The three parakeets would fly around the small apartment.  When my soon to be mother-in-law would visit, the birds would rest on her head.  She was a small woman – not five feet tall – with sparse, gray hair.  They must have thought it was nesting material.  She was always a good sport about it.

So you can see why ending the little thing’s life was not even a consideration.  Then I had the idea to try and revive it with brandy so I got the brandy and an eyedropper.  Charlie was fascinated and very much involved in the dispensing of the brandy into the bird’s beak.  How much to give it?  Didn’t even try to figure it out. I just dropped a few drops in and watched.  Sure enough, the bird perked up.   Then he stood up and staggered a few steps.  Then he plopped down.  Then I gave him some more brandy.  Same routine.  Finally, he attempted to fly and executed a short if whirlpool flight – a little like Wilbur’s early short hops as his feathers were growing back.  The next time he tried to fly he made it to the low branch of a tree and swayed back and forth, mercifully anchored as birds are by their toes.   Honestly, the other birds in the vicinity all flew over and it looked for all the world as if our bird was telling his story.  Maybe recommending the brandy.  Who knows.  Brandy, wine – it’s all good.  Maybe we should give Wilbur a little send-off Pinot Noir when we release him.

In the 2010 Oregon Wine Awards competition for his 2008 Pinot Noir.  The results were announced today.  I knew the results would go online today, May 1, and I could hardly wait to get to my Blackberry this morning … this is Jim’s first professionally produced wine for the commercial market and the first wine we have entered anywhere so we really didn’t expect any recognition.  Needless to say, we are pretty excited!  We’re pouring today and I’ve made a big sign for the tasting room to announce this.

Thank you to everyone who has already tasted this wine.  We didn’t make this in great quantity – one of the reasons it is so good is that it is artisinal and limited – so now we’ll have to make sure we put away just a little to savor in the future before we sell it out!

Yippee!

We are getting ready to bottle – always an adventure, believe me!  This year, we thought we should investigate screw caps vs. corks so, at the annual wine seminar in Oregon, I went to the session on Closures. 

It turned out to be fascinating.  I heard about a lot of things I would never have thought of in a million years – things like water-based colmated corks, polyvinyl chlorides and torque meters.   I listened to discussions of the sensory experience of popping a cork and I heard about the differences in grades of cork.

I had no idea that cork comes from the Oak Tree – Quercus Suber, actually known as the Cork Oak – and that most cork comes from Portugal.  There are issues of sustainability about which to be concerned, none of which I had thought about too much – except that we have been throwing our corks into the compost bin. 

For me, it was a pretty easy decision to go with cork, and with a particular company called ACI.  This is not a commercial for them – we’re paying for our corks! – but we so prefer to do business with people we like and the people at ACI are just terrific. Even if they weren’t, we’d be using cork.  Screw caps can’t be recycled here because there are no facilities in the USA that can process them.  And even if they could, the plastic liner in the cap makes them non-degradable.  It also turns out that corks take so long to break down into compost that it isn’t the best way to handle them.  There are ways to recycle cork and Oregon is a leader in this effort: www.CorkReHarvest.org.   

Jim produces a perfectly natural wine with no chemicals.  He babies his grapes and watches over his wine throughout the entire process.   Jim loves the land – and it seems to love him right back!  I can see his awe at what the land produces from the simple pea vine to the complex grape varietals.  We try to do as much as we can to protect the planet.  Using corks from a company that cares about the environment is important to us so we were delighted to find out a little about ACI.  Here’s what they have to say about sustainability:

 ”Of all of the closures in the fine wine business, only cork is a totally natural and sustainably raised product.  It is harvested from trees that are at least twenty-nine years old and then harvested at a minimum of every nine years thereafter.  The harvesting of the cork bark does not hurt the oak tree.  The tree lives for 150 to 200 years.  The harvest in Portugal is so important that the government requires farmers to replant all oak trees that are cut or die of sickness.  This sustainability has the benefit of increasing the forest (Montado) in the Iberian Peninsula and therefore providing vital habitat for the last of the great cats of the Western European Continent (the Iberian lynx) as well as endangered birds (the Iberian Imperial eagle and the black stork).  It is one of the last truly Mediterranean eco-systems that are preserved in near its original state.” www.acicorkusa.com

I really like that part about the lynx, eagle and – especially – the black stork!

Our corks are imprinted and even the ink they use is an organic based product, a derivative of soy ink. (Actual soy ink comes off – it’s the same as is used on newspapers and you know they don’t pass the white glove test.)

Small Winery Bottling Line!

So, look forward to our 2009 wines, enjoy our 2008s and know that we are doing what we can to preserve our planet.

We have the best dogs – everybody said so this weekend!  Really, the focus of the weekend extravaganza here in our corner of wine paradise was for people to be able to visit the wineries in North Willamette Valley that are closer to Portland and Beaverton and not (yet) as well visited as those in wine country. 

I can tell you that it worked!  We probably have the tiniest tasting room in the county, if not the state; so small that more than 5 people and it is crowded.  We had about 150 people visit over the two days and, laws of gathering what they are, people usually came in clusters so there was always someone here and, often, it was at least five people at the same time, if not more!

Luckily, the weather was good so people could wander around on the patio and, since Jim was doing wine-making demonstrations in the winery itself, groups tended to self distribute.  We LOVED meeting everyone and we loved watching our two dogs take charge.  Gemini and Trouble don’t actually bark, which is a good thing.  (Well, they do bark but only when they go out at night before retiring and do what Jim calls a “bark-around” warning less welcome critters to stay away for the night.) 

Trouble, however, can look a little intimidating with his gigantic Pit Bull head at the end of his lanky, Boxer body.  I’ve had delivery people call me from their trucks to ask if the dog standing at their door is friendly.  He is and his wagging rear gives that away.  He doesn’t wag his tail so much as he wags the entire back half of his body.  To be sure people felt secure, Jim had the idea to put a bandana around the dogs’ necks.  Trouble got hot pink and Gemini got pale pink.  Trouble took one look at Gemini’s accessory and removed it; but, not out of mischief we think, but because he wanted to be the sartorial star.  And he was.  They both were busy all day long meeting cars, escorting groups up and down from the winery to the tasting room, obligingly doing all their tricks.  They looked, for all the world, as if they were making suggestions … “You should really try that Pinot. We love it….”

I hope it was the wine that curried favor all weekend and allowed us to sell what we did but, in truth, I think the dogs helped!  They definitely slept well each night – see photo above! 

Thank you to everyone who visited.  We’re so glad you got to meet us, the dogs and that we had a chance to serve you our wines!

What to do about Wilbur.  This is on my mind every time I lift my head from my computer and look out of the window into Wilbur’s aviary and beyond.  The dilemma is that Wilbur can fly perfectly, now, and we feel like we should let him go.  He sits on the little perch Jim built for him and surveys the bit of world he sees, which is pretty big, probably, from a pigeon’s perspective.  Sometimes he sleeps, all puffed up.  Sometimes his sits on the branch perch across the corner of the aviary.  This actually thrilled me when he started to do it because I knew it meant he had his balance back.  It was a couple of months before he ventured up there. 

He definitely knows his name and, gradually, has decided to stay closer to me when I feed him every morning,  He used to sit at one end and wait for me to put the seed on his ledge, back off and call his name.  Then he would fly over.  Now he flies over immediately and stands there while I pile in the sunflower seeds, his favorite.  We tried grapes when Jim was dropping fruit last year but he didn’t seem all that interested.  Hmmmm.  A teetotaler pigeon?

I worry that he’s lonely although he does have visitors  during the day – some good, some bad.  The good ones are the little sparrows and small robins that fly into the aviary to nibble the seeds he leaves behind then fly out until the next meal.  He seems to really like the beautiful blue jays that land in the Magnolia Tree and then come over to eat spilled seed on the deck floor just outside of his aviary.  He looks at them, cocks his head, seems almost ready to coo at them.

Hawks are a different story and there are a couple that have stalked him.  I haven’t seem them in a while so maybe it would really be safe to let him out.  Still…I don’t know.   Where will he go?  There aren’t any other pigeons around here so we’ve talked about taking him to the racetrack next time we go out to see the horse training there.  Many pigeons live there and I’ve seen several with red feet, the sign that they are not native to Oregon, so maybe he can make it.  But, what if he’s not accepted in the existing groups?   I’m hoping he will head back to our barn where he had taken up residence when he first flew in.  He would stroll around in the arena, in and out of the horses legs.  All was well until Trouble decided Wilbur would be a nice lunch.  Has Trouble learned that Wilbur is not a meal?  Trouble did learn that the cats just don’t want anything to do with him and he leaves them alone.  Not sure how the barn kitties, White Paws and Tiger Paws would treat him, though.   

The possible solution Jim thinks will work is to cut open a little flap near the top of the aviary and build another perch up there so Wilbur can fly in and out as he pleases.  Jim says he will do this but I notice he’s in no hurry either. 

It’s hard to see our little chicks leave the nest.  Maybe tomorrow.  Maybe not.  Not today.

Most people are surprised when I mention New York City as my hometown, but it is very much like a small town if you think about its different neighborhoods.  There is a story in today’s NYTimes about wine stores in several of New York’s little neighborhoods from  Brooklyn to Long Island City to a bunch of shops in lower Manhattan.  Frankly, it’s still amazing to me that some of the locations are in places I would never have thought of growing up as becoming hospitable to wine drinkers and wines shops … but, who knew!  Anyway, it’s a good piece.  Here’s the link:

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/03/24/dining/24pour.html?hpw

I’ve already been on the phone to a couple of them and we’ll be sending our wines.  Nothing would please me more than our Cornelius wines showing up in Brooklyn, right near where I grew up!