Cultivating Wine Grapes on a 2-Acre Estate Vineyard | PARAGRAPHIC

They say in real estate it's location, location, location. In the vine industry it's attention, attention, attention. People will say, oh you just plant them, water them, and pick them. Wine growing is farm life. Plants are really good about telling you what they want. The vines this year are amazing. I'm a firm believer that all of the real work happens out here. They're really surprised how good it tastes. It's literally sweet tart candy. In the vineyard we really want that true expression. If it's a tougher year, I'm okay with the wine showing that. When you're in this vineyard at least, you're in another world. The amount of time it takes to just do a block during the day can be very zen. Gives you a lot of time to think. I can still work eight to ten hour days. I'm going up and down the hills. It's just a healthy environment. In our winemaking we want it to reflect what we're doing here, and what the soils are here, what the climate's like. All that translates into the glass. We're not trying to be California. We're not trying to be Oregon. We're not trying to be Washington. We're kind of keeping our eyes on our own work, and making the best wine we can from start to finish. Amid the rolling hills and golden sunlight, a quiet miracle unfolds. Here on this estate vineyard, the land speaks in whispers of tradition and patience. In the hands of its keepers, soil becomes sanctuary, and each vine a story waiting to be told. From the roots to the ripened fruit, this is the journey of wine, where nature and nurture dance together in perfect harmony. Welcome to the art of growing wine grapes, where the vineyard is more than just a place. It's a way of life. I don't know if this is a better shot than going down. I'm constantly putting up these fences. I love these iron fences. You don't have to paint them. They have that artistic look. Every day in the vineyard for me is a great day. I'm Samuel Adam. I'm the caretaker of Hidden Hills Vineyard. I'm a Barbera farmer. Hidden Hills is a traditionally small vineyard. It sits on a slope overlooking the southern part of the valley. It has over 2,000 vines. It produces probably between 5 and 7 tons a year, which equates to 2,500 to 3,500 bottles of wine. These Barbera here on Hidden Hills are a little over 20, 21 years. And that's not a lot of years. If you look at the 200 years that California has put into their vineyards, there's 1,172 varietals of grapes. People are attracted to a certain white grape, purple grape, red grape. We have red Italian Barbera grapes that we grow on this property. Barbera is the traditional wine of Italy. It is in the top five planted each year. So people are starting to get to know Barbera as a great wine. When you're out here, you should be picking a grape, tasting how sweet it is, and then you take a look at the seed. And if the seed is brown, it's like getting ready to be picked. Very sweet. It was at 22 bricks this morning. The grape keeps maturing, maturing. Bricks are the sugar content that is in the actual grape. So usually we pick them 22, 23, 24. And while it's fermenting, the bricks, the sugar, works down to the alcohol. So if a brick is 26, the alcohol content will be 13. It's always half. So what us viticulturists talk about is a cluster. Each vine produces, from the spur, sprouts that go out. And each will have anywhere from two to four clusters on it. Each of these clusters are controlled by the leaf that develops up the shoot. Each cluster needs to have at least 18 leaves to do the photosynthesis to mature the grapes. More leaves, a little better, a little faster maturity. Each cluster, at least with our Barberas, have at least 69 grapes. And that can be as many as 160, depending on the size of the cluster. So when we're picking and somebody misses a cluster or they drop a cluster, we tell them quickly pick it up. That's a glass of wine. The netting in all vineyards are very important because they protect the vines, the grapes from the birds and the bees that will attack it. They can smell when that sugar is high and they come in and they go after it. Last year it was half the clusters, but twice the size. This year we have twice the clusters and half the size. As with any great endeavor, success in winemaking comes from a blend of tradition, patience, and a deep desire to never stop learning. From nurturing the vines to pursuing perfection in fermentation and bottling, there's always something new to discover. That's why it's important to take advantage of powerful knowledge resources like today's sponsor, Skillshare. If you're interested in winemaking and eager to deepen your understanding of the craft, there's no better time to start exploring new skills. 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Take the opportunity to expand your knowledge and pursue your creative passions today. So today we are showing Barbera to bottle. And the two main factors in that process is the farming and the fermenting. And Adam is taking care of the fermenting. He's the winemaster. And I'm responsible for the vineyard and making sure that it flows well and is attended to. At the time the netting goes on, my job is done. The winemaster takes over and tests for bricks, tests for acidity, and tells me we're ready. And then we pick. We're actually just lifting nets so that we can get access to the fruiting zone, so that we're able to pick our fruit today, which we're going to start here in about two minutes. General rule being, if you wouldn't eat it, don't pick it. We want to see a little bit of this raisining here. Uniform, not too much rot or shot berries. That looks good. There's a little bit of everything in there, some younger grapes than some older that are already raisining and drying out, which is giving us all the flavors we want. And then it's just hunting them down in the canopy. So this is the one point where we get to be selective before we start processing. So we try to clear out most of the mog is what it's called, which is matter other than grapes. That can be anything from bugs to leaves to raisins to sunburned grapes. And it's just like cooking. If you don't start with the best ingredients, you can't really hope to have the best final product. Being that this is a smaller vineyard, we're probably expecting somewhere around a half a ton off of this. Other vineyards like Sam's, we actually will see about five tons from that one. We do it early in the morning so that the fruit's cool. That's because the plants will want to shut down in the heat of the day. And basically all of our flavors end up kind of going back into the plant because the plant shuts down and doesn't process. For like our bigger picks, we'll end up getting a lot of volunteers, but it's kind of hard to ask people to come out and give up their morning at five in the morning to work for about an hour. The nice thing is about it, when we came here, I knew nothing about grapes, but all my neighbors, all the other developers, they came in, helped out, gave advice. And what happens in this season, every morning for about two months, I'm picking their grapes and they're picking mine. So it's a real family group. I've loved the wine industry because I thirst for knowledge. And even if you learn everything there is to know about wine in one year, it's all going to change next year. It keeps things diverse. And for me, my day is never the same. It's always a different adventure. Yeah, like I said, anywhere from doing this as far as picking, keeping an eye on the vines, to bottling, to filtering, to blending, to minor electrical work, all those kinds of fun things. A lot of people don't understand that wine growing, it's farm life. So it's, you know, early mornings, late nights, but quite literally the fruit of our labor. We get to see around this time and it makes it all worth it. The vines this year are amazing. Well, this is a very reflective time for the farmer. He's going through the rows and going, wow, I did well here. I really screwed up over here. What should I do next year? What's a better strategy? So this is a calming time. Picking, love picking. You want to balance what's above the ground with what's below the ground. So you want your root structure to kind of be reflected in your canopy, which is where the leaves and the fruiting area is with the grapes. So it's kind of like bonsai, but on a much larger scale. We have about seven acres planted of estate vineyards, including our Barbera. We're able to give each plant individual attention at multiple points during the year. When you have the massive like hundred acre vineyards and things like that, honestly, you don't give that opportunity as much as you would like to. It's all stylistic. If you're growing grapes in the hundreds of acres, you're doing more of a bulk style where this is more of a craft style or a estate or small single vineyard, single varietal. We're really just kind of trying to showcase this particular site in the northern Arizona, down south in the Wilcox areas. You'll see the much more vast plantings of varietals. That's more intended for mass production wine. The Zen will probably end up with somewhere between 50 and 100 cases off of it, as opposed to 500 to 1000 cases. So we have the green stem going down to the cluster, but right where it connects or comes off of the main shoot, it's starting to lignify or go from the soft green plant matter to woodier, like older aged, harder lignified is the word, wood. Basically, what that is, is the plant is shutting down the pathway to send all the nutrients to the fruit. So basically, the plant's already telling us, hey, I'm getting close to being ready. So that's why we're out here picking. We just have great soil. We don't add any chemicals to the plants. Officially, they could be organic, but we're not going through that process. So we just give it a lot of love and attention. When they're growing, you got to make sure wind blows through it. They're aerated, but not too much. The one thing that people don't realize, and they see all these pictures or they're looking at a vineyard, and they're looking and they see this row of Italian cypress. Well, there is a purpose for those. Over the course of the sun setting, it blocks the heat on the vines on the west side. They say a cypress never dies. When you plant the cypress all at the same height, and this one dies because of an infection, a bug infestation, you cut it back and it grows back up. The roots are as deep as it is high. Just being present in a vineyard is 99% of the battle. You're gonna be able to see issues and be able to get ahead of them before they become real big problems or widespread issues. So it's really a relationship with the property. Even in the winemaking process, we're only really just using organic sulfur as the most basic of preservatives. We're firm believers in being varietally correct, being shepherds of the entire winemaking process from the literal planting of new vines to aging them to a point where we can get usable fruit. Then nurturing the plants through the growing process, getting out here, picking it. Two weeks before we pick, we shut the water off, which gives the plant time to get the green berries to purple and get the sugar levels up. It's a pretty good example of what red grapes go through. They go through a process called veraison, which is the transition from these green new grapes into the final red grapes that they're going to be. This is a very immature cluster. This is going to have a very high acid, very little of the ripened fruit flavor we're looking for. So we're just going to go ahead and discard that. And a good winemaster can walk through here and know what this is going to taste like when it comes out of the bottle 18 months from now. We know that not every year is going to be a beautiful, stellar, 100-point vintage. We get that, especially here in Arizona. It's even harder because we are literally making wine on the frontier. When Mother Nature's in charge of the front end of your business, you know you're going to be in for a roller coaster ride. You can never really predict. You know, like we could decide we wanted to pick this morning and last night and monsoon could have come through and it would have given us about a 48-hour delay because the plants will have to work through that water. Those extremes and those tougher, harsher growing environments actually do create and concentrate flavors that are unlike anywhere else. We can kind of do whatever we want because we're out here writing the book. Occasionally. Next year. I crushed it so he couldn't eat for him. Okay. Anything I have been doing is de-stemming. It's basically taking the berries, crushing them, so breaking up the berries and then flinging the grapes off of the stem in the center of that machine there. So it's a de-stemmer crusher. Cool. And just like that we spend 15 minutes making a mess and three hours cleaning it up. This will cold soak for 24 to 48 hours depending on where I want it to be and then we'll run all of our analysis on it, do any adjustments we need to acidity or sugar. Then we'll inoculate it. It'll ferment in this room here for about two weeks ideally and then we'll drain all the juice off of it, take all the skins, throw them in our press and then off we go. There we go. You can see him go back over me on the way back. I don't even know if I have enough room to turn around anymore. We sample this vineyard in two different portions because of the way that it sits on the hillside. They tend to mature at different rates but actually this year they're pretty close. So what we're tasting right now is the upper 13 rows out of the 26 and we'll taste the lower rows here in a second. But sugar's going up and acid's going down. We want to try and catch them right in the middle where they intersect. So that's usually around 24 to 26 bricks for this vineyard. Brighter characteristics than it has been in the past years where we do have like a little bit darker, woodier, earthier notes in previous years. I think this is going to be a throwback to the 2020 vintage where it was really bright. If this wasn't almost 25 degrees bricks, that acid would take the enamel right off our teeth. This is going to be the lower 13 rows. Slightly darker. These actually I think we're showing a little bit more mature. Definitely shows in the juice. Definitely further along and not by much. So I would say they're probably within days of each other as far as maturation goes. What is that? It's strawberry raspberry but there's a... It's not herbaceous but it's a spice. And it is starting to lignify in some areas of the lower part for sure. I'm starting to see that woodiness. Let's go ahead and tentatively... I'll check again on Tuesday but let's tentatively plan for Friday. We'll send the flag up too to get all hands on deck for that. And that'll sit there. What we're going to do is we'll add a little bit of hydrated sulfur so that it keeps anything from growing during the 24 to 48 hour cold soaking phase. That just kind of keeps bacterial growth and yeast growth to a minimum. Takes care of anything that might have come in from the vineyard. And then what I'm also going to do is I'm going to go ahead and gas the head space in here. The empty space between the lid and the fruit with argon gas because I want to get the oxygen out of there because that's what these microbes and bacteria actually like. They need that to live as well. Plus also this is just a bin full of food for them. They're really surprised how good it tastes. For the first time they've had Barbera and they go, wow, why haven't I heard about it? And it is a really good wine. The Barbera is very acidic. However, this Barbera is very juicy. When the winemaster cradles it in a barrel for 18 to two years, it softens it. So it's a very good sipping wine. Over the 20 years, we've had at least six different tasting rooms work with the grapes. Right now, we're working with Oak Creek. They absolutely love the Barbera and they take care of them very well. And so right now, Oak Creek, you can buy it either through the mail or visit them at the tasting room. People are real surprised with how green it is here. They're real surprised when they stay from April to May or June, and they literally in a two day, three day period, they can see the growth of one to two inches. Everybody thinks Arizona is just one solid desert, but it's not. We have our own subculture here and it can be raining on all parts of this valley, but not here. And then vice versa. They can come up here. There's a lot of tasting rooms and a lot of vineyards. It's a good relaxing time for them. Anything else that you'd like to add? Love my puppies. Gustavo, what are you doing? Gustavo.