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State of the Vineyard II: Harvest and the Parable of Block 305

2008-01-02T22:35:00.001-05:00

State of the Vineyard II (early November 2007): Harvest in the Short Hills Bench and the Parable of Block 305

The Niagara Escarpment is a limestone ridge, a prehistoric dorsal fin composed in layers of petrified armoured fish and tiny crushed crustaceans. They lend their mineral remains to our soil in the Short Hills Bench, the same soil my settler and pre-settler ancestors are buried in, the same soil we spread our father's ashes on, the same soil I may one day be added to myself. Around here we believe you are what you drink; you might even be related to it.

Our land's soils are the residue of an eroded mid-continental mountain range dragged here by prehistoric glaciers. Shards of limestone ground fine off of the escarpment's rock face by icy glacial teeth are tossed up in forty feet of dark bronze clay.

(Though the family cemetery is behind the winery

it would be false to claim that this is the source of

the body in our wines)
Home to mountain lions, coyotes, deer, wild turkeys, pheasants and possums; also home to black walnuts, tulip poplars, maples and coniferous trees. The north meets the south in this Carolinian Climatic Zone, on land which supports thick forests but also vineyards beneath the shadow of the Niagara Escarpment.

It's been dry this year but thankfully the rains came in July, not too late to size the berries during their period of rapid cell-division. In what has been the driest vintage in 37 years, 2.5 inches of rainfall pounded us in two staccato bursts over two days. This added 10 percent to our smaller crop by sizing the fruit. If the rain had added tonnage alone we would have been pleased since the hot days and cool nights already made the fruit quality very high. But the quality rose further as the vine-quenching waters reinvigorated the plants. And then the tap ran dry till harvest. Perfection.

(After flowering comes fruit-set. The sneaky, stalking vine!)
To explain: All plants eat sunshine and it is the tallest trees that are the hungriest, the whales of the forest. That sunshine is used to combine CO2 from the air with H2O from the ground to make wood, roots, leaves and fruit. Trees have strong trunks and grow taller than the other forest plants to spread their great canopies. Vines are forest creatures that compete with trees. The nimble vine has no trunk, just branches; why waste precious resources on a lumbering trunk when you can use a tall tree as a crutch? The vine creeps along the forest floor and stalks the tree like a snake, striking out from the cool damp shade towards the light above. Once coiled high it spreads its broad leafy jaws in a verdant canopy, then it too eats the sun. When conditions are wet vines reproduce themselves through growth. They shoot bull canes that can root themselves independently so that if the plant is severed one becomes two, and so on. The forest Hydra.

If there is stress however, say too little water for vigorous growth, then the vine has another survival strategy: make babies. The vine produces bunches of seeds wrapped in sweet pulp and thick skins. Self-pollinated from tiny flowers, wine grapes are in fact the sweetest of all berries.

(Grapes, like other fruit, go through veraison -

they turn colour from green to yellow or red)
It is the stressed environment that all vignerons cultivate. Instead of expending limited resources on long creeping stalks to climb trees the forest dwellers laze on wires strung between posts. They don't hunger for light - we ensure that they get all they need and more. It is water that we limit by planting them on slopes while under-draining our vineyards with weeping tile. All this results in less plant growth but sweet berries with vine-ripened flavours. Think of the difference between a green pepper and a red pepper. Both may be sweet but the red one tastes "riper" than the green one. That's because green peppers are unripened red or otherwise coloured peppers. Put a green one in the window for a few days and you'll see it go through veraison, on the sunny side first. You've seen examples in the grocery store, the blotchy ones you probably never buy.

So stress is good - but to a point. Even athletes can overwork their bodies when trying to build muscle and cause damage. Too little water and a vine will shut down, even stopping ripening despite ample sunlight. It's about degrees of stress; and the type of wine you want to make plays a role too. This July nature provided us with the critical rain at the critical time, especially in the Short Hills Bench and in a tiny spot near Vineland Station. This rain narrowed the 2-inch cracks in the clay and nourished our vines. Data from our weather station in conjunction with a network of others showed that in the growing season of 2007 the Short Hills Bench was both the warmest sub-appellation in Niagara and the one with the greatest daily temperature fluxuations between day and night - and the most rainfall despite the drought.

(Chardonnay and Pinot Noir grapes, ready to be picked for the Cuvee Catharine Brut sparkling wines)

(Boxes are half full and not because

winemakers are native to optimism. It's to

prevent bruising of the skins)

As always harvest began with Chardonnay and Pinot Noir grapes for our sparkling wine, the Cuvee Catharine named after Henry's wife (that's her actual tombstone above). We always pick this fruit early, at lower brix (sugar levels) and at higher levels of acidity. These are delicate wines that show any imperfection because of their natural crispness. All of the work must be done by hand - each box is only half filled to prevent bruising of the skins. Bruising causes oxidation and the extraction of unpleasant (for this wine) phenols from the skins. Hand picking is critical to great sparkling wine, more than for almost any other wine.

Chardonnay, Pinot Blanc, Baco Noir, Pinot Noir, Gamay, Sauvignon Blanc, Gewurztraminer, Riesling, Merlot, Cabernet Franc, Cabernet Sauvignon - all were harvested in that order and all were exceptional by any measure. So exceptional that for the first time, in 2007, we will be making the full range of our Speck Family Reserve wines in the same vintage: Chardonnay, Riesling, Pinot Noir and Cabernet-Merlot.

(This is my brother Matt pre-harvest; note the clean

shave and the cheery disposition. The latter will be

maintained through the icewine harvest in December)

Our task is to get consistency in our vineyards even when the soil, the plants and the weather may vary. I think that we do a pretty good job of this year in and year out. Matt, my brother, spends nearly all of his time training and coaxing the vines to grow the quality we require. Yet vines are alive, they aren't machines, and from time to time despite all your convincing them otherwise they will do their own thing too. I like to tell the following story as a parable of what boutique winemaking is: This year our Block 305 Cabernet Sauvignon acted unusually. Matt trains this beautiful vineyard for our reserve tiers of wines - it's more than just reduced yields which make the fruit from here great. Still, this year the drier than usual flowering period for this later starting variety gave the appearance that some of the vines were on a different clock from the others. About one in twenty had lower sugar and crisper acidity than the others which still had their characteristic boldness for the reds we have come to expect from this block. What to do?

(The view towards one of the preserved forests on

our land from our eponymous Short Hills Bench Vineyard)

We make three tiers of Cabernet-Merlot blends from varietal (red and rose) to Reserve to Speck Family Reserve. In 2007 the conditions have permitted the production of each tier and at exemplary levels of quality. Whenever we feel that quality dictates, however, we follow the time-honoured practice of declassifying or blending down some or all of any given tier, either as wine or grape. This has the effect of keeping quality high at all levels.

(Triage: Mssrs. Decampo and Breau hard at work)

We could have left this small amount of fruit hanging (only 5% of the total really) and harvested everything together as red without dramatically affecting the Reserve wine. In most places in the world this would be common practice. But great wines are great by the accumulation of many little touches, and what we decided was that here were really two wines growing in the same vineyard, a red and a rose. So even as Block 305 acted a bit unusually it was also an opportunity- earlier than for the red harvest we combed through the vineyard with our best pickers and gleaned the fruit from these 1 in 20 vines. This is another time honoured practice called triage, most often employed by us for making Botrytis Affected Riesling. The fruit from the Cabernet Sauvignon triage was expectedly of lower brix than the remaining fruit which we let hang longer to wring out the last hours of autumn sun (why not, there wasn't any rain in the forecast and the acidity was good?).

There was a special home for the fruit hand-picked in the triage, in a new wine we have made only twice before and for which we especially want fruit of lower sugar levels, our premium Cabernet Sauvignon Rose. It was a win-win as the fruit left to hang got deeper, darker and sweeter while the fruit we harvested early was crisp and delicate. Exactly what we needed for red, exactly what we needed for rose, both wines made better by the triage.

(All in a day)

Our customers will never know that they are getting a healthy portion of our very best fruit in our happy vineyards. Cabernet Sauvignon Rose - but all they need to know is that they like the wine.

Daniel

State of the Vineyard, Part I (June 2007): First flowering

2008-01-02T21:38:00.001-05:00

(Bud burst)
(Note: Every Saturday and Sunday I run my two dogs Olive and Popeye in the vineyards. Inspired by the first flowering in the vineyard I wrote this e-mail on my Blackberry and sent it out as an e-blast to a small group of friends. The response was so great that I started the blog in October. State of the Vineyard Parts II and III will follow.)

Sunday June 3rd, 2007

Hi all

Just walking Olive and Popeye and thought I'd send you an update on the vineyard: The Baco Noir started flowering overnight which means that Chardonnay, Pinots Noir and Blanc and Gamay won't be far behind. Riesling, Sauvignon Blanc and the Meritage reds (Merlot, then Cabernet Franc, then Cabernet Sauvignon) will follow, all in roughly that order. So, with flowering just started, it will be about 100 days till harvest (rule of thumb) - but a lot can happen along the way speeding up or slowing things down. Harvest for still wines usually starts in the second or third week of September, so we're right on track.

(Pre-flowering -- the little caps still cover the flowers)
After a slightly slow start this year the vineyards are in major growth mode. We actually prefer a slow start (meaning cool weather through mid-to-late May) since it delays bud break. This means minimal risk of damage should we get a late spring frost. (If the buds aren't out then they are less susceptible to frost damage.) We have wind machines if necessary but winter is really our biggest frost worry, not spring. Ahhh, farming.

In Niagara the season goes from winter right into summer. Spring is very cool and short so the vines barely react to it. When the heat does come on the green growth explodes out of the vines. For example, the shoots on the later budding Riesling have grown about 2 feet in 2 weeks! I'm looking at a Baco Noir vine as I write this and it has enjoyed 3-4 feet of growth in the same time.

(The tiny caps are off revealing tiny flowers with
5 stamin each. Those that self pollinate become grapes)
The mild winter just past has meant a very good bud count. Buds have burst every 4-6 inches on the vine so we have a very consistently distributed crop. After shoot thinning (to keep the best positioned buds) we will be left with the canopy trained for high quality: vertical shoot positioning, consistently distributed buds all at the same height on the vine and rows planted north/south for even sun exposure on both sides of the vine (this applies to our latitude in our hemisphere). All of these factors even out ripening and push fruit aromatics, so-called physiological ripeness, as well as sugar/acid balance. Unfortunately much of this work has to be done by hand - but who said quality came easily, or for free?!

(From zero growth to hero growth in 2 weeks: Cabernet Franc)
All of our vineyards are in the Short Hills Bench on moisture retaining clay soils. We had a lot of rain over the winter and some of that is being held in the clay. As our vines are all quite established with deep root systems they have access to water far down in the ground. The dryness hasn't been an issue for us to this point and won't be for a while. Still, it has been a fairly dry spring so far and we'd like to see some rain. Let's hope for cool nights with rain and warm weather during the day!

Back to running the dogs. (Popeye is off chasing a jack rabbit the size of a small deer!)

Daniel

(PS - Olive and Popeye recline at home

after a good chase awaiting a cookie

in lieu of the rabbit they didn't catch)

A vineyard is planted at the end of the Black Walnut Trail

2007-10-17T10:31:00.001-04:00

(Our vineyards as seen from the Short Hills Provincial Park.)

My name is Daniel Speck and with my brothers Paul and Matt we are the proprietors behind Henry of Pelham Family Estate Winery. My immediate family has been on a 25-year journey to create hand- crafted wines of quality and authenticity. But in some nascent way the journey really began 200 years ago when our Loyalist forebears, refugees, looked north for a new home at the end of the Walnut Trail and landed in the Niagara Peninsula's Short Hills Bench. The purpose of this blog is to introduce you to our family and to tell you the stories behind our land, our winery and our wines.

(The Mennonite-built wagon in front of the winery.)

Our father’s ancestors were Loyalists who moved north during the American Revolution. When Nicholas Smith and his family settled under the Black Walnut trees of Niagara’s Short Hills Bench in the late 1780’s, he and his 14 children became the first to farm our land. Henry Smith was one of the sons and he became an innkeeper who collected a toll on Pelham Road which crossed his property. By coincidence, around the time the land was settled, the Prime Minister of England was a Sir Henry Pelham (no relation). With tongue in cheek, when Henry Smith licensed the tavern at his inn, he chose the moniker Henry of Pelham and the nickname stuck. Because Henry was the first person to plant vineyards on our land, we have honoured him ever since with the naming of the winery. We have also paid tribute to his wife Catharine, the family matriarch, by naming our sparkling wines after her.

(Our parents, Paul and Bobbi Speck.)

Paul Stanley Speck, our dad, was born during the Depression in 1931. He was the youngest in a family of ten kids, son of the St. Catharines dog-catcher. The Short Hills Bench was not as well known for fine wine then as it is today. Dad’s family was brutally poor and all of the kids worked. He was a truck driver at the age of15 (was that legal?) but managed to finish high school. Dad, who became a voracious reader, used to say “By the age of 19 the only book I’d ever read
was Peter Rabbit.”

St. Catharines was a tough place then with little opportunity. And so during the war his brothers found their way out into the world through the military. For my dad it was the priesthood, which was also his path to an education.

(Grampa Ernie, the St. Catharines dog catcher.)

He became a teacher and studied at the University of Toronto and Cornell, then at Fordham before meeting my mother who is from Manhattan. My mum, Bobbi, is the youngest child born to Ted Schroetter and “Tony” Inciardi (my middle name is Anthony, in Grandma’s honour). Mum’s grandparents were Hungarian and Italian immigrants who were entrepreneurs and artisans in turn of the century Manhattan. Mum became a book editor.

In the 1960's the priesthood and my father parted ways. My parents married in the mid 1960’s, moved to Toronto and in 1966 my oldest brother Paul was born. Matthew followed three years later and then I was born in 1974. My parents had started a small private high school in our house on Brunswick Ave. in Toronto’s Annex, but with three young boys competing for space the school was moved into its own home on Madison Ave. My parents ran it there for 20 years.

(The original vineyard team: the Speck bros., cousin DJ and a good friend. The family members all share Inciardi genes.)
In the 1980’s, as some Smith cousins were selling off the different parcels of land my parents felt strongly about keeping what they could in family hands. They put several pieces of land back together and started the next family project. It wasn't too long before Paul, Matt and I were sent on regular forced weekend and summer marches to “camp farm” in Niagara where we planted the vineyards.

In Niagara the three of us lived a Lord of the Flies existence in the then decrepit old inn that Henry had built in 1842. Paul was 16, Matt 13 and I was 8.

There was no fresh water, there were holes in the walls and ceilings and wild animals were kept at bay by our cocker spaniels Bronte and Boswell. At night, through the spaces in the floorboards under my bed, I could hear the sound of something being dragged along the stone floor in the wet, damp cellar. I still don't know what that was.

(The Inciardi men, forebears. Note the strong family resemblance...)

During the day we tore up the original vineyards planted by Henry a century and a half before, we chased the sheep off of the farm and shovel-planted the initial 65 acres over a few summers with our friends (then later we planted a hundred more). Our neighbour Billy Holder supplied us with a chest freezer full of chops, steaks and burgers (no one knew what to do with the roasts but we managed to eat them anyway). For dessert I’d eat Cream of Wheat smothered in butter and maple syrup. The fridge was always full of cheap beer and freezies. We cruised the vineyards on quads, trikes and bikes. Matt saved and bought a dune buggy. It was like a page from “Where the Wild Things Are” and except for the grueling work it was an adolescent’s paradise.

We did work. And learn. A prudent vineyardist takes four years before cropping young vines but in that time he must still farm the land. As autumn and school approached each year we would return to the civility of home but always kept an eye on the farm. Soon Paul was at university followed by Matt while I, being the youngest, finished up at my parents' school. Like Paul and Matt I eventually went to St. John’s College in Annapolis, Maryland, where each of us studied philosophy and science. At that time my father became ill and Paul agreed to come back home upon graduation to spend a year getting the winery off of the ground. One year became two, three and then Matt made the same bargain as Paul and the years went by for him too. Our father passed away while I was at St. John’s but he lived to see the winery’s first profitable year. With the young winery seeing its first critical acclaim my brothers steered the ship until I also returned home and joined them in the family business – but only for a year... More than ten years have gone by since I returned to Niagara and today we continue to work together managing different aspects of the winery.

(The westernmost extremity of the Short Hills Bench.)
We have each worked in the different parts of our craft, spending many years in the vineyards and winery and have traveled many miles on the road selling what we grow. Like people's lives, wines too are the assemblage of many parts. Even if those parts come from the same vineyard the different aspects bring uniqueness to what is finally composed: The west side of the field is trained one way; the east side another. This fruit sees oak; that fruit does not. And so on.

A great part of winemaking is the people behind the juice and the choices they make in the final composition. This is where all three of us come together with our winemaker since 1990, Ron Giesbrecht, and his longtime assistant Sandrine Epp. These collaborative tastings are critical to shaping our house style.

This house style is also informed by you. We would like to know more about how our wines have come into your life and any thoughts you may have about Henry of Pelham, so please contact us. With a glass of Cuvée Catharine Brut in hand – cheers!

Daniel