Purple Air
Have you used the purple air tool online yet? It shows air quality readings from all around. You type in your location, and it pulls up a map with the closest readings and a key too show you just how bad it’s gotten. Confirmation and another map to get oriented during these hazy days.
https://www.purpleair.com/
View looking over northern Napa Valley last week.
Ripening Grapes and RRV
A couple weeks ago we had a break in the smoke, a chance to enjoy the fog and view the beautiful grapes ripening despite 2020. Here are a few photos from a vineyard in the Russian River Valley (RRV).
Also, here are a couple great articles on Russian River Valley fruit, and the distinctions and significance of terrior:
A Scientific Case for ‘Fingerprinting’ Terroir in a California AVA
Update from the Garden
The garden is in full stride, giving us something to pick each day. Tomatoes, tomatillos, cucumber, peppers, squash, watermelon, herbs. We’ve had so much fun trying new recipes with fresh ingredients. Our favorite this week was salsa verde with tomatillos, chili pepper, and garlic roasted and crushed.
Peeled tomatillos
Garden salsa verde
Good words
Thank you to DNC Vineyards for the good words and positive vibes as we continue harvest. Cheers!
Harvest Time 2020 Vintage
2020 is proving challenging in more and more ways. We were happy to kick off the harvest season with a successful early morning harvest this week. Thanks to everyone who worked hard and got the job done. Cheers!
Vineyard Falcon Kite
Once the grapes begin to ripen in the vineyard, we aren’t the only ones that get excited. The birds know it too, and they’re not waiting for a perfect combination of sugars and acidity to ferment into age-worthy wines. In those vineyards with the most issues with birds, we often net the fruit-baring area/zone of the vines. In this case, we also installed a falcon kite which soars above the vines with wind to ward off hungry beaks.
View from the Vineyard
How quickly things change. Perhaps that’s 2020’s mantra. Though I suppose we could all think of multiple others that would suit.
Last week in the vineyard, Francisco made the rounds, checking on vineyards and grapes as we wait for the fruit to ripen. The vineyards look great.
Francisco out checking the vineyards (and staying safe!)
And here the grapes. Wine grapes in all their glory. Look at these!
And then this week, 2020 continued to belch and spew bad news as a sudden lightning storm erupted in the summer sky. Billowing through, bringing fire, fire tornadoes (why is that a thing?), trauma, smoke, and ash. Today’s view:
We watch and wait with anticipation. A hope, wish, and prayer for all our friends and family in Sonoma and Napa Counties.
Summer Fav: Frozen Grapes
It some how still surprises me that we never tire of grapes in our house. We work with grapes and we love to eat them too. We go through 10 lbs of table grapes a week, easy. At harvest time, we have to regularly clean out the bottom of our washing machine as it fills up with grapes (of course, there’s debate about whether that’s from being out in the fields or the kids’ mess).
During the summer, one of our family favorites is enjoying frozen grapes. We bring them home, wash them, remove them from their stems and lay them out on a baking sheet and stick them in the freezer for a few hours, then collect them in a ziploc bag for snacking. They don’t last long. For grown-ups, they’re great to drop in your glass of wine to keep things cool at the end of the day (pseudo sangria?) and then enjoy the booze infused fruit at the end. For the kiddos, there a sweet, easy, healthy treat.
This Week in the Vineyard
This week in the vineyard, we’re weed whacking to keep the vineyards clean, we’re going through and removing leaves and hedging as needed - a little canopy management, and anxiously waiting veraison - when the grapes start to turn their ripened colors.
Latest Good Word
We love hearing our clients are happy with our work! Latest good word from our clients:
Fish Dish: Baked Salmon
There are a few dinners that are just better with wine. The dishes almost beg for a pairing, and the sipping helps savor the dish. Pizza and a nice medium-bodied red wine - our go-to is Zinfandel. Tacos and Pinot Noir. Fish baked or grilled with a well balanced (fruit and acid) white wine. Maybe it’s the acidity that helps cut the fat in the food, the combination embodies mouth-wateringly savory. Maybe it’s because we’re in wine country and it just makes sense. Maybe it makes the evening feel more celebratory and less like a Tuesday.
Either way, we enjoyed a nice piece of salmon, flavored with cilantro (substituted for the dill in the following recipe) from our garden, lemon, garlic and butter. And served it with roasted red potatoes, and fresh green beans with a little butter, salt and lemon. Back-deck kinda eating. It was good. And so, we share the following recipe inspiration for baked salmon and say a socially-distant cheers!
We used this recipe from Tastes Better From Scratch. She offers lots of good tips, and three flavor options. We went with the Lemon & Dill and substituted cilantro for dill.
Good Fruit
Seeing the fruit grow in the vineyard never gets old. It’s a product of good pruning and tending of the vines. It’s the anticipation of what they will become, and an acknowledgement of the vines’ demands and measure of time based only on sunlight/weather.
Here are some photos from this week. Old vine fruit and grape vine shoots.
Kale Chips
From our home garden to the table - kale chips. With recipe.
When we started this business, Francisco was adamant about the logo. It had to be green. We are wine growers and plants that are healthy and strong are green. Green is our color.
The greenery is also calming, re-assuring, and exciting. This year we’ve been able to extend that to our home garden. Our latest green harvest - kale. Now, if you’d told me a few months ago that I’d be writing my first food post on the new blog (in a previous life I was food blogger) on kale, I would’ve laughed. I’m not kale’s biggest fan. I get it, kale is a super food. It’s also a chore to eat raw.
And then we had fresh kale greens in the garden. We had kale seeds on-hand this winter, and Francisco sewed some along with the other greens, first planted indoors in March and then transplanted outdoors in April. We didn’t know how good we had it, and let these leaves get pretty large before our first harvest. Their wavy, green leaves have been lovely in the garden and we let them hang on longer than needed before we finally harvested.
Harvest we did. Before being turned into something wonderfully delicious:
Toasted and transformed - the leaves made a delicious, fought-over, pre-dinner snack. Below is the recipe. Enjoy and cheers!
Toasted Kale Chips
Ingredients
Bunch of kale
Olive oil
Kosher salt
Directions
Preheat your oven to 350 deg. Line a cookie sheet (or two depending on how much kale you have) with parchment paper.
With a knife, cut away the greens from the thick stems. Then roughly slice them into 2 inch pieces. And place them in a large bowl (with room for tossing).
Drizzle the kale with olive oil. Do this with a light hand as a little goes a long way. Use about 1 tablespoon of oil if you have enough kale to spread out evenly in one layer on a cookie sheet. Sprinkle liberally with salt.
Bake in the oven for 10-15 minutes, until the leaves are crisp to the touch. Toss in a bowl and don’t forget to taste some before sharing with others (they’ll be gone by the time the bowl comes back around to you).
Weed Whacking
Benefits of weed whacking your property.
Weed whacking - cutting grass and weeds in places that are difficult to reach. Sometimes this means carefully going around the grape vines. Sometimes this means traversing a hillside.
Reasons for keeping your property clean:
It looks nice! There’s a pretty high standard in wine country and plenty of iconic shots with beautiful rows. A well-tended vineyard is obvious. The grape vines and the rows between are neat.
It’s safer for those around. A clean vineyard means less hiding places for critters - in particular rattlesnakes. Seriously. It’s safer for workers and for anyone living close to the vineyard. Check out this article (SF Gate) - rattlesnakes mated earlier this year and we can expect to see baby snakes in the next few weeks.
Fire safety. As we all know, we’ve been experiencing more intense fire seasons over the past few years. And this year our area is already on fire. We’ve have fires in Vacaville, Solano County; Petaluma in Sonoma County, and Contra Costa County. There is also an active fire in Yorkville in Mendocino County. We don’t want to add fuel to the fire - literally, so cutting back grasses is part of the prevention. It helps create your defensible space zone.
‘Tis the season. Here’s to keeping the vineyard clean! Some photos from weed whacking in the vineyard:
Ocean Drive Along Highway 1 in Sonoma County
A Memorial Day ocean drive along Highway 1 in Sonoma County.
So many things were different this Memorial Day weekend. It definitely felt more somber with shelter-in-place orders. Its purpose also felt more glaringly obvious as we support brave healthcare professionals on the front line of our current enemy - COVID 19.
Every year when the weather warms up, the rains stop, and the roads dry up, we usually head to the coast in Sonoma County regularly to enjoy the mega sand box, calming sounds of crashing waves, hope of a whale siting, and the familiar cool, salty breeze. The change of scenery and perspective feels like a true adventure. With the parks still closed to encourage social distancing, we decide we would just drive by, take a look, and soak up the awesome Pacific views.
In Sonoma County, Highway 1 follows the coast for 56 miles (SF Chronicle). We focused on the stretch from the port town of Bodega Bay (Hitchcock’s The Birds, anyone?) to the delta where the Russian River meets the sea. For more history on the region, check the Sonoma County’s Coastal History.
In terms of wines and vines, the salty, cool air is vital to our micro-climate growing regions of the Sonoma Coast and Russian River Valley AVAs. Along with the foggy marine layer, the cloudy blanket that rolls inland and covers the sky in the evening, and rolls back out to sea in the morning, comes a daily cooling. This break in temperature gives the wine-grape-producing vines a much deserved and desired break. As the vines rest, the grapes maintain their flavor-balancing acidity. Cheers to that!
Here are some photos from our ocean drive.
Our Garden
We had actually decided to expand our garden before the pandemic turned life on its side and helped us focus more on home and not just work. Last year, Francisco removed a large oak tree which left us with room for an additional garden bed this year.
Last year was our first garden, and like true newbies, we started too late. Come fall, the cucumbers were amazing, and the corn some how grew 15’ tall, but most of the summer we spent watering and looking longingly at the plants, waiting for them to offer their fruit.
This year, we got our seeds out in February, and planted indoors in the first week of March. At some point the labels we had on everything washed off (note for next year), so we’re enjoying some guesswork and finger pointing this spring. The plants went into the ground the week of Easter and, well, they look happy to be outside - green and full. We’ve harvested lettuce and spinach. And this week, we cut back the oregano, and are drying it for later use.
Upside down and in the California sun.
Do you have favorite plants/varieties for your home garden?
It's Here! Website Redesign
We’re excited to announce the launch of our newly redesigned website!
Our goals with this redesign were providing our visitors an easier way to learn about Solorio Vineyard Management’s services, improve the aesthetics, and simplify our content. Cleaner and clearer.
We’re also working on a couple new features that will give us an opportunity to expand our content and services. Stay tuned…
Your feedback is important to us, as we strive to develop a website that is valuable to you. Please submit any questions, comments, or concerns using our contact form.
Thanks! and Cheers!
The Fog Rolled In
Note - this post was originally published 08.02.2015
The past few days the coastal fog has rolled in as far as Napa Valley and brought with it cool, dark mornings. A relief for us (and the grapes) from the heat wave and threat of wild fires.
On the Road in Napa
Note - this post was originally published 07.30.2015
Harvest has started and you can see grapes, bins, and tanks being transported up and down the valley. These last few days have been up over 100 degrees. Ripe.