Things are Changing at HHV

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Everything old is new again! Things are changing around here at Hollywood Hill Vineyards! Steve has taken a full time job working for the Puget Sound Blood Center as a Database Analyst. Needless to say, managing a full blown tasting room, two kids, a winery and a job are a bit overwhelming. We we are going is pulling up stakes at the little red house on the circle and moving the tasting room back to the winery.

For those that have been to the winery, you know that it’s quite a nice spot to taste wine overlooking our vineyard and gardens. March 16th will be our last day at the current tasting room and we will reopen the old tasting room in early April. For now, we are going to be closed on Sundays and be open on most Saturdays or whenever we feel like throwing our signs down at the end of the driveway. Best way to find out when we are open is to follow us on Facebook or get on our email list.

If you have any questions, email or call and I’ll be happy to talk with your! Stay tuned here for the latest news!

Xmas and New Year Case Sale!

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Hollywood Hill Vineyards in the snow!

We are having a case sale through January 2013. Come in or order off the web page Wine and we are having a special case sale offering 30% off of selected wines.

2008 Rattlesnake Hills Syrah
Regularly $34/bottle $408/case
Now $23.80/bottle $285.50/case
30% discount.

2011 Yakima Valley Roussanne – 20 cases left
Regularly $22/bottle $264/case.
Now $15.40 bottle $184/case  
30% discount
2009 Puget Sound Regent – 6 cases left
One of the few Puget Sound grown red wines for a truly local experience.
Regularly $28/bottle or $336/case
Now $19.60/bottle or $235/case 30% discount
2009 Red Mountain Syrah 
Regularly $34/bottle or $408/case
Now $23.80/bottle or $286/case
30% discount
2009 Horse Heaven Hills Grenache – 6 cases left 
Regularly $30/bottle or $360case
Now $21/bottle or $252/case
30% discount

La Nina finally over??? Puget Sound Climate

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I just might be coming to an end! I’ve been following the long range computer models and reading Cliff Mass and it looks like things might be shaping up to be a pretty nice summer. I haven’t had time to run the numbers but reading through Cliff’s blog post we look like we are starting the uphill climb to a normal summer, something we haven’t had in a couple of years. When I got started in growing grapes in 1998 it seemed like our late winter and early springs were warmer and drier. Summers weren’t a lot different than they are now and somewhere around late 2007 things seems to be going in a different direction. Sure we’ve had some really nice summers, like 2009, but it’s the late winter and spring weather that really kicks off the growing season. Since 2008, we’ve had a string of really cool spring weather. I remember it seemed like for many years that somewhere in the first week of April we’d have bud break on the west side of the cascades. Even in 2009, it was a late spring, but when May rolled around the heat kicked on and we made up the difference and harvested Pinot Noir the last week of September.

I’m hoping that 2012 will go down like 2009. We need a nice hot summer to have a chance this year or at least a nice dry September and October. Something we have not had in a few years also. There is some good evidence that La Nina is finally giving up it’s icy grip on us for a while. The image I have above is the temperature charts from the pacific ocean. You can see that the orange areas are temperature readings that are above normal and for the first time since last summer we are starting to see readings above normal. The above normal readings are about where they were last July, so I think it is trending towards warmer weather. Long range forecasts have the PNW in a cooler cycle for three months out, but people like Cliff Mass are saying by the end of May we should be out of the rut and into warmer weather.

How are things in my vineyard this spring? They are running really late. Here it is March 24th and my vines are starting to bleed and the buds are starting to swell. Something we should’ve seen 2-3 weeks ago. I think I have about a month to go before real bud break. Good thing I’m not done with the pruning! Keep your fingers crossed for warm weather this summer. I could really use a good harvest from my vineyards!

What is a Small Winery?

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I think before we can continue about starting a small winery, we need to define the word “Small Winery”. I think most people have the vision about a traditional small winery is one that has a few acres of grapes and there is a small winery building on the property where the wine is made. Sometimes the people that run the winery live there and is usually a family run business. I think that is the ideal that most people dream when they think of small wineries in general. The truth is not always too far from that and it think it’s dependent on where you are located in the world.

First let’s talk about the size of the winery. Many dreamers think about running a small winery by themselves or with help friends and family. Many times this is a part time endeavor supplemented with a full time job elsewhere. Generally, that means a winery that is less than 2000 cases a year. When you start getting above that size, it generally means working with distributors, staff to help run the winery and employees to run a tasting room. OK, lets just say that for our purposes a small winery is 2000 cases or less, but that is also a subjective number. What is small to one person is not small to another. Having seen the logistics to run a winery that makes less than 1500 cases, I know what’s involved in the day to day tasks and at a certain point it is more than one person can do just on weekends.

If you throw a vineyard in there, that is a major time sink that will suck up many more hours when you can be out selling wine. A tasting room can take up many hours of time also. Think about it, if you are making 2000 cases of wine, you have to sell about 5 cases a day, 365 days a year! That is a ton of wine to move, especially if you are a one or two person shop.

When I think about one person doing the majority of the work and only bringing in help for crush and bottling, I think with the right equipment you could easily handle about 1000 cases with no problem. That is if you don’t have to manage a tasting room and you can somehow sell all your wine through mail order and a distributor. I know there will be people out there that prove me wrong, but just from my own experience, I know how much work it is.

There are many permutations on a small winery from custom crush, to importing wine from another state to one guy making wine in his basement. Most of what I want to cover in this series is the guy dreaming about having a few acres of grapes and running a small winery. Not necessarily a full time job but not something huge either. I know many people dream of quitting the rat race and doing this and it can be done with the right planning and some money. You can turn it into a full time job if you want or not. It’s up to you.

Most of the people reading this are probably thinking about starting something small and growing it. I had my first harvest in 2005 and we made about 400 cases of wine. It’s surprisingly easy to make that much wine with the right equipment and a little help. We quickly grew to 1200 cases but what prevented us from growing was not our equipment or space but the amount of wine were could sell. In fact, it’s not much harder to make 1000 or 2000 cases of wine with the right equipment. The trap that I see many winemaker get themselves into is that what do you do with all the wine you just made? Prior to 2008 high end wines were flying off the shelf and then all of sudden everyone was drinking two buck chuck! It’s very crowded out there in the wine business and I will explore that later but wine making is the easy part. Wine selling is the hard part!

Why start a small winery?

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There are as many reasons to start a new winery as their are wineries! There is no simple answer to that question, but in this post I will talk about the reasons you might want to start one. For me it was my passion to do something with my hands and not sit behind a desk the rest of my life. I was fairly restless working at Microsoft back in the late 1990′s and I kept wondering if there was something else I could do with my life, then I had the epiphany when I took the grape growing class Bainbridge Island Vineyard in 1998. But before that I was already on a trajectory with alcoholic beverages and my passion about homebrewing. By that time, I had been brewing beer at home for about 8 years and I would not have met Becky if it weren’t for beer (we met on an organized pub crawl!). At first, like many that get into winemaking, I didn’t think long term about what I was going to do with this thing. I just knew that I was really, really into growing grapes and making wine. As with many, one thing leads to another and voila! I own a winery.

 To me, there can be several key reasons to start a winery. The wine business, like other “arts” tends to attract a lot of people that are looking to get out of what they are currently doing (like I was, sitting in a cubicle all day long) and get into the “fun” of the wine business. There are many ways to quench that thirst rather than start a winery, but a few of us opt to go all the way and make wine as a business. As I started to mention, many start a small winery as an offshoot from a hobby gone crazy. This is basically how I started and I think a large percentage of people start small wineries this way. For me, I made the legal limit of wine (200 gallons) and was looking for a way to turn it into a business. Many people say to themselves, I’m making all this wine, why can’t I just sell it? It’s not hard to make the leap to 500 cases of wine if you already have the equipment to do 100 cases. Just fill out the required paperwork for the federal and state governments and you are in business! We’ll talk later about the hardest part of the wine business, which is selling it!

There are many hobby wineries that never have the intention of making money. A few people start wineries as a deliberate business plan to make money. This can work, especially if you get all the pieces in place and you know what you are doing before you get started. Many small wineries owners do not know the in’s and out’s of the wine business and make mistakes early on. I have seen many wineries fail from lack of funding and other missteps along the way. Making money in the wine business is a tough proposition and can take way more time than other businesses do. Plus the capital investment up front is huge and it is tied up in equipment and wine for many years before you see a profit.

 Starting any small business can be tough on a relationship, especially if you are married so I highly recommend that you have your partner’s complete stamp of approval before you start a winery. Many couples get into together as a way to share a passion about something they both love. This is especially fun to do when the children are older and you have more spare time on your hands. Don’t do it the way I did and start a winery when you have babies running around the house. My timing could’ve been a little different and less stressful.

 Sometimes people start wineries as a vanity project. Look here! I’ve made it in the world and now I own a winery! Probably not as common as other ways that people get into starting a winery, but it does happen quite frequently. Many times these projects are driven by money and an ego. Most of the time these projects are not necessarily meant to make money.

 Well, I’ve covered several reasons why people start a small winery. It’s not always clear cut and many times people don’t set out to make money at it. Many times these wineries are a side business to their main job and are just a hobby gone crazy. It’s tough to make a living on a winery if you don’t make enough wine and work at it full time. Keep that in mind. Also, if you run a vineyard it eats away a lot of time selling wine. Just ask me about that! Either way you cut it, you must be very passionate about running a small winery and wine in general if you are to succeed!

Starting a Winery series

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Steve and Becky in the winery

Look at us! We look so happy here! I have to say I have a love/hate relationship with the wine business. I have been in it for 14 years and have been seriously drinking wine for about 20 years. Before that I was a serious homebrewer who seriously thought about opening a brewery. At one point, I passed the BJCP and was a judge for homebrew competitions back in the early 1990′s. Shortly after that I got married and Becky and I took our honeymoon in Napa way back in 1995 when it wasn’t quite as crazy as it is now down there. In fact, I have very vivid memories of visiting Napa Valley in 1982 with my uncle who lived in San Francisco at the time. We had just gotten back from spending three years in Germany (which was a wine drinking adventure in itself!) and were visiting (we lived in the Washington DC area) and my uncle took my father and me out to wine country for the day. I distinctly remembering going to Girgch Hills winery and sitting out front having a picnic lunch. It was quite fun!

The big epiphany for me was in 1998 when I took a grape growing class at Bainbridge Island Vineyards and Winery. Gerard and Joann Bentryn with Betsey Wittick ran the day to day operations of the winery and the vineyards. In those days, they ran a pretty tight operation and I really admired how they had pulled it off without taking investment or loans and paying for everything themselves. Sure, there was some overlapping of jobs but eventually they supported themselves solely on the winery. I just remember sitting on the ferry going back to Seattle after the class thinking that I had found my dream job!

After that day, I sat at my desk at Microsoft unconsciously plotting an escape from the corporate grind to live in the nirvana that is the wine business (tongue firmly in cheek!). I quickly came up to speed on grape growing and wine making through hands on experimentation and consulting with other winemakers and grape growers.  I started a long slow decent into the wine business that culminated in our first real crush in 2005 and selling our first bottles of wine in 2007. I have learned a ton along the way and that’s what’s great about the wine business there is always more to learn! Wine is steeped in history and continues to this day as a cutting edge science.

That’s the beauty of the winery and vineyard business. You can come at it from many different angles and go deep into one area or skim the surface and still have a great time. Personally, I came at from growing grapes as my main driver, which is a little bit different than most. Although I was getting an education in wine tasting along the way, my priority in the beginning was grape growing and then I followed up with winemaking. That’s the other great thing about making wine and growing grapes, do get into it you don’t need to get a college education to be successful. It doesn’t hurt, but most of the people I know that have small wineries don’t have a formal education. Also, when I started, it really wasn’t very easy to take college level classes in winemaking. Now there are many options all over this country. Many community colleges and state colleges have stepped up with viticulture and enology classes. Even community colleges teach two year degrees.

I think that is my main point here is that anyone with the drive, talent and a bit of money can be successful starting a small winery. In the next few weeks, I hope to cover many facets of starting a small winery with emphasis on Washington state, but applicable to most places in the USA and Canada. Along the way, I hope you comment and ask questions. I am also thinking about putting on a class similar to my grape growing classes about what it takes to start a small winery. Drop me a note  if you think that is something you might be interested in the future

La Nina over for 2012?

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It’s been a while since I wrote here, but I an feeling a renewed energy after this last ENSO report from the NOAA. It’s been a long time coming where we are finally pulling out of this deep La Nina cold weather and might actually have a decent summer since 2009. Looking over the data, it seems like we are recovering pretty quickly in the Pacific ocean and it just takes a while for that to  translate to warmer temperatures around here, but it will happen.

If we back up to December and early January you might remember we had the 2nd driest December on record! It sure was nice weather, but not good for the snowpack. Things turned around a bit here in February with some wetter weather and the snowpack has almost recovered to normal levels. Temperatures have been normal or slightly below, but I sure missed those sunny days we had in earlier this winter!

What does this mean for us? (if they forecast holds up, which has been known to be wrong!) If things hold up, we should slowly have a nicer spring and summer should be normal to warmer than normal and then hopefully Fall will be warmer and drier than normal. We might have a later bud break than normal, but like 2009 we could see a fast recovery in the summer time. Like I said before, here in the Puget Sound AVA (and Washington state in general) we need a normal year to get things back on track around here!

Cabernet Dorsa

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I had some email with Thomas Henick Kling from WSU and it looks like they are going to get Cabernet Dorsa into the state at my request from FPMS in California. It will probably be put into their research block at WSU and maybe released in a couple of years. I’m not sure that this grape will do well here in Western Washington, but it may do well in Eastern WA (not that anyone will want to grow it there, but that’s another topic!) This brings up the issue of new grapes, which I am torn on. On one hand I love that there are always new grapes being developed and that they can bring new wine quality to a region like ours. On the other hand, we have plenty of grapes to work with here in Western Washington and sometimes I think we need to just put our collective heads down and work with the varieties that we have available to us now and make world class wines!

Anyway, some specifics on Cabernet Dorsa. It’s a cross between Cabernet Sauvignon and Dornfelder. I’m glad that they named it Cabernet Dorsa because with a name like Regent, it’s a harder sell in the tasting room. It supposedly ripens before Dornfelder and Cabernet S. It makes a rich, dark, spicy wine that takes well to oak. It is catching on in Germany with over 500 acres planted. Those Germans keep looking for a dark red grape to grow in their conditions. Keep an eye out for it in several years. Like all things in the wine industry, things move very slowly!

2012 Grape Growing Class

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Sunday, February 26th 2012, 9am-4pm. $125
Coffee, morning snack, lunch and wine tasting provided.

Following on a tradition I learned at other local vineyards, I’m putting on my 5nd annual Cool Climate Grape Growing class. This is a full day class for people interested in growing grapes in their backyard or people that want to take the next step and run a commercial vineyard. This class is focused on growing grapes in the Puget Sound region, but these principles could be applied to a wide variety of locations from Oregon to British Columbia.

A little about me, I’m going into my 14th year of growing grapes on a commercial scale. I first started out on Maury Island Vineyards where we tended a 3 acre vineyard for six years. After six years, we decided to start a new vineyard and winery in Woodinville. I’ve taken UC Davis extension classes, attended a week long Cool Climate wine making class. Lectured at a variety of places including South Seattle Community College, Western Washington Horticultural Association and the WSU Focus on Farming. Finally, I have been teaching Viticulture in the South Seattle Community College wine program for the past 2 years.

As for the class, we will be focusing on how to grow grapes here in Western Washington. The class will go from 9am to 4pm. We cover a lot of ground in the class. We’ll provide the food, coffee and wine and also give you a notebook of the slides from the class. During the last hour of the class, we’ll prune in our vineyard and you can take some cuttings home with you to start for yourself.

Topics covered by the class will be:
- History of Puget Sound wine growing
- Puget Sound Climate
- The rain myth
- Site Selection
- Grape variety selection
- Site Prep
- Starting cuttings
- How to train vines
- Cost to establish a vineyard
- Pest control
- Harvest Parameters

Call me 425-753-0093 or email me steve@hollywoodhillvineyards.com
We have room for about 20 people and seats go fast.

2011 Year in Review

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Growing Degree Days
Deviation From Normals

I thought when we had such a crummy year in 2010 here in the Puget Sound AVA that it would be hard to repeat it. Well, I was mistaken. One little dirty secret in the wine industry is that we never talk about how crummy the weather is, we have to spin it so it sounds like everything went well. 2011 was not one of those years. From Napa Valley to Vancouver Island, the weather did not behave. Sure, many will make great wines, but there were many tons of grapes that rotted or were left on the vine because they didn’t get ripe.

Here in the Puget Sound AVA things were no different. If you look at the charts, you’ll see that the Growing Degree Days got off to a bad start and stayed that way all year long. The winter was long and cold, but relatively dry. When we needed the heat in March and April to wake the vines up, we had cold and rain. In fact it stayed that way pretty much until August 20th. You can see by my chart on the deviations from the normal, that we had below normal temperatures pretty much every day until August 20th, then we had a rally of sorts until September 22nd where the heat flatlines compared to averages, but by that time the damage had been done. Things were so late that almost no amount of heat would allow the vines to catch up and ripen before the rains started to fall in the middle of October. Sure enough, the heat came and went and unlike 2010 where we had some pretty nice weather in October, we didn’t this year. Last time I checked my vines, the Pinot Noir was about 15 brix and then the starlings descended and wiped out the vineyard. It wouldn’t have made a difference because we ran out of time and heat. It was a similar story up and down the west coast. Parts of California got drenched in Ocotober. Eastern Washington did OK, but things ran super late. Most people picking their late ripening red grapes late in October and even into November and finally having to pick everything when the frosts came.

The odd thing about 2011 was that we finished up with a decent amount of heat, at 1825 Degree Days, which in this part of the world is a decent year. But like I mentioned earlier that once you get off to a late start, almost a month late by most grower’s records, it is super hard to make up a deficit like that. 2009 was an exception, but it got really super hot that summer and we made up a late start and actually harvested early that year.

This year also tells me that I might have been shooting high for my ripening dates, but then I had about 12 years of experience to back me up that said I could ripen Pinot Noir in the Puget Sound region. I guess the deviations graph kind of explains how bad things are.

Cliff Mass and others have suggested that we are still going to have La Nina in 2012 again, but not so bad as this last year. I sure hope not, my poor vineyard needs a break! I need some grapes too! My best guess (and they have known to be wrong), suggests that we will start with La Nina and move to a neutral weather pattern over the summer. The main problem the past two years has been two fold, late start and wet Fall weather. Both can be overcome if we ever get off to an early start, something I have not seen since 2006. This past year also tells me that diversification is the key to a commercial success. Regent, Pinot Noir Precoce are going to be key grapes going forward. We better learn to work with them now.