If you love Oregon food and wine, you’ve got to get your hands on a copy of The Vintner’s Kitchen:  Celebrating the Wines of Oregon (Arnica Publishing, 2008).  We’ve got copies in our tasting room, signed by the book’s photographer, Rick Schafer.  It was a pleasure to be involved in the project, and we’re thrilled with how the book turned out.  Wine writer Cole Danehower wrote a really nice piece in the book with expert perspective on our wine growing region.  Back in April, I got to play chef and food stylist for a day, and it was big fun.  Scott, Pirrie and I were returning from a week of vacation and I thought to myself, I think I promised to cook Veal Osso Buco, Swedish Meatballs and Beef Stew for a photo shoot tomorrow morning!  And so I had. 

I had submitted the recipes months before and they’d been tested by the book’s author, Chef Bill King.  Now it was time for photographer Rick Schafer to come photograph them.  To be honest, there were no instructions.  Did they want side dishes, fully cooked dishes, some raw ingredients, garnishes, or props?  I spent four years as a right hand and publicist for Chefs Susan Feniger and Mary Sue Milliken, including loads of time at the Food Network, so it was fun to return to this work again, even if only for a few hours.  Rick is a terrific photographer and delightful to work with.  He loved that I wanted to use my grandmother’s Depression-era silver, my funky cowgirl napkins, and Scott’s Swedish great-grandfather’s copper lunch dish that his great-grandmother used to deliver a hot noon meal to the mill.  The three Scott Paul Wines recipes in the book are ones that we prepare frequently and like, and hope you will too.  You might want to try our very simple version of Boeuf Bourgignon.   

Boeuf d'Oregon

We are honored to be featured in print in two different ways today.

First, issue #32 of Burghound.com was released today, and we are thrilled to have received the 2nd highest score given for any Oregon Pinot Noir in the report. Our 2006 Audrey scored 91 points and a lovely write-up. Kudos to Archery Summit and Begstrom – the only two wineries that edged us out with scores of 92 for their 2006s. Publisher Allen Meadows does a great job covering not only Burgundy, but the world of Pinot Noir, and we hold him in the highest esteem.

Then, we received today our first copies off the press of John Haeger’s new book -

” Pacific Pinot Noir – A comprehensive winery guide for consumers and connoiseurs”. It’s really well done, with detailed info and tasting notes on all of Oregon and CA’s notable Pinot producers – and we are nicely profiled on the pages within. John will be here in our tasting room signing copies of his book on the Saturday of Thanksgiving weekend – and the book will be yours free with the purchase of a 6-pack of 2007 Audrey futures, a 6-pack of 2006 La Paulée, or any full or mixed case that weekend (while supplies last – of the books and the wine!)

More fruit coming in the morning, so it’s off to a shower and bed and back at it again!

I’m just off of the sorting line – we brought in about 14 tons from Momtazi Blocks D & J today – the fruit was gorgeous, clean, and very tasty – barely needed sorting, really. We’ll probably do about the same amount again tomorrow, and again on Thursday – and in the middle of all that I’ll be doing a sold-out Grand Cru Burgundy dinner at Le Pigeon in Portland tomorrow night – should be a blast!

The highlight of the day was a visit this morning from Rex Pickett – the author of the novel Sideways, which bacame the smash movie that ignited the Pinot Noir boom in this country that has continued ever since. It was fun talking wine and movies with Rex – who was in town researching an article for a Golf & Travel magazine, and he was hinting around that a sequel to Sideways was in the works – with characters Miles and Jack heading to the Willamette Valley in this one. Sounds great to me!

Here’s a shot of Rex with Martha – we had a nice lunch of roast pork, ratatouille and couscous with the crew, and then started sorting the incoming fruit. In all, another great day! More soon

Today’s another day of Remontage and Pigeage – those are the French terms for Pump-over and Punch-down. With fruit newly in the fermenter, we generally pump-over once in the morning, and punch-down once in the evening – nice, gentle extraction to get the best of the flavors the fruit has to offer without extracting excessive tannins.

We’ve just comfirmed that we’ll pick 10 acres of our Momtazi vineyard tomorrow – Blocks D & J – and then we’ll get the rest over Wednesday & Thursday. The weather looks to be holding nicely – mostly sunny and mid-60s for the rest of the week – cold at night into the hi-30s…

And here’s Arabella doing what we’ll be doing a lot of tomorrow – loading fruit onto the sorting line…

A few days into the latest harvest I’ve experienced in Oregon has brought me to this realization: our annual “La Paulée de Carlton” dinner coming up on November 1st will not be the traditional end-of-harvest celebration it usually is, but rather a mid-harvest break for bacchanalia! We always hold this event on the first Saturday of November, and that it usually a very good bet that harvest will be done by then, fermentations complete, and everything resting nicely in barrel. Not this year!

This time we’ll be moving fermenters out on to the crushdeck, and rearranging as best we can to set up the fermentation room for the dinner. So, this may be a rare opportunity for you to dine in a winery actually in the middle of crush and fermentation. We’ll do whatever it takes to make it happen – it will be a fun challenge, to say the least!

A few seats still remain for the dinner – call Kelly Karr at 503 319-5827 to book yours or email kellykarr@scottpaul.com. It’s always a total blast – everybody brings great older Pinots to share all around, a bunch of our winemaker friends join us, and a very good time is had by all.  We look forward to seeing you here.

1999 was the last time harvest came this late around here, and I know that some folks were still picking Pinot into November. I imagine that will happen again this year, though I expect we will have all of our stuff in well before that. FYI –  Early reports from Burgundy are encouraging for 2008 – especially in the Côte de Nuits, and most notably in Chablis, where they have had another spectacular vintage.

I’m off to check in on the evening punch-downs. No more fruit until Tuesday – it’s nice to have a little break in the action. And here’s a shot from the La Paulée dinner in Burgundy last year, in the Drouhin cellars that date back to the 1200s…

La Paulée de Beaune - 2007

Thanks to the immediate response from our friends at OVS and ADEA, we got a new motor delivered right away, and had the sorting line back up and in action by 3:00 or so yesterday afternoon. While we waited for repairs, the crew played old Burgundian dice games and chilled out. Then we got back into action well-rested and ready to rock.

And rock we did – through 12.6 tons of beautiful fruit from our blocks of RIbbon Ridge. Again it was a very clean pick – the only sorting needed was to remove a few under-ripe berries here and there – otherwise it was pristine. It seems that this vintage is playing into our hands very nicely so far.

Now we take two days off from picking, and focus on pump-overs and punch-downs on everything that’s in already. We’ve got about 40 tons to go, all from our sections of Momtazi – and we’re still thinking we’ll take them mostly on Tuesday and Wednesday, and perhaps a bit Thursday morning as well. The window of good picking days on the biodynamic calendar closes abruptly at about 10am on Thursday – after that it’s another week until the window re-opens. Fortunately, our fruit is ripe and ready. It’ll be a crazy few days coming up. We’ve got a dozen fermenters full right now. By the end of the week it’ll be closer to 50 – that’s a lot of ferments to manage, not to mention a lot of long days on the sorting line. Ahhh, that’s why they call it crush!

And here’s a shot of me sorting the fruit from Ribbon Ridge yesterday. More as it happens…

Well, in our ten years of making wine we’ve never had a major piece of equipment break down in the middle of crush – until now. I suppose it was just our turn. The motor that controls our hydraulic bin dumper – the contraption that tilts the bins of fruit on to the sorting table – decided to give up the ghost after working perfectly for the first bin this morning. Then it just plain died. An exploratory search revealed a shot bearing in the motor. Fortunately we were able to locate a replacement – which is supposedly on the way as we speak.

The good news is that it’s a beautiful but very cold day – so the fruit is resting in perfect conditions on the crush pad while we await resolution of our mechanical difficulties. The fruit is in beautiful shape – it barely needed any sorting, at least the first half-ton we got to before the breakdown. What was going to be a sweet, no-hitches, finished-at-a-decent-hour day has now turned into a few hours of downtime with literally nothing to do, to be followed by a long day on the line and a late night at the winery. I often say that winemaking is kind of like making a movie – it’s a lot of “hurry up and wait.”

Here’s a shot of Pirrie and her Pops in the vineyard this morning, when all was still going well -

And here’s French-Canadien intern Miguel on the sorting line yesterday (where we hope he will be returning shortly this afternoon!)

Another perfect harvest morning here in the valley – and we’ve all had a good rest after a 12 ton pick at Maresh yesterday. We’ve been very happy with the quality and character of the fruit so far. Just got back to the winery from Ribbon Ridge – where the pick is close to finished – we should have fruit arriving at the crush pad within the hour. Here’s some beautiful clusters waiting to be plucked this morning…

And here’s a bucket-load going into the bin…

And here we are on the sorting line…

Gotta run – more soon!

The great news is – we’ve got an endless string of sunny and cool days headed our way for the next solid week. The downside of that is that we’ll be picking everything in those next few days, and we wll literally be up to our elbows in Pinot for the forseeable future.

We’re picking at Maresh right now, with about 14 tons expected from our 7.29 acres scheduled to arrive at the crush pad in waves over the rest of the day. The fruit looks clean, tastes delicious, and it’s cold! About 42 degrees when we started the pick this morning. This helps keep the fruit in excellent shape, and it de-stems really nicely – ending up with about 90% un-crushed whole berries going into the fermenters.

More later – in the meantime here’s a nice view over the valley early this morning -

Harvest 2008 is officially under way at Scott Paul. We picked our 16 rows of young-vine Pommard at the new Coats & Whitney site in Yamhill-Carlton this morning, and we’re scheduled to grab all of Maresh tomorrow and then Ribbon Ridge on Saturday. The fruit looks clean, flavors are yummy, it’s clear and cold, and we’re good to go!

Loading up the pick at Coats & Whitney

The fruit is arriving at the crush pad as I write – we’ll update later after we’ve sorted and destemmed…

Coats & Whitney Block 2

OK – just back from the sorting line – which only at the very beginning of crush, before the first grapes have rolled through – looks like this:

A clean slate, ready for crush!

 

 

Two minutes after that photo was taken, the sticky juice, skins, leaves and general grape goo invaded, and will rule the domaine for the next few weeks! We brought in the first 2.1 tons of about 100 tons that we’ll harvest this year – here’s Miguel and Arabella (our awesome 2008 harvest crew) inspecting the first bins before Kelley started loading them up onto the sorting line:

 

The First Fruit of 2008

 

The fruit will be “hitting the fan” in earnest tomorrow – we’ll do about 14 tons from Maresh, and then another 14 or so from Ribbon Ridge on Saturday. It will be getting crazy, but I’ll try to post as the insanity allows. Here we go!