Amalie Robert Estate 2025 Vintage Update: Harvest After Action Report (HAAR) & Cyber Monday Offer!
Hello and Welcome,
This is the Harvest After Action Report (HAAR) and photo journal, Vintage 2025, from Amalie Robert Estate. A FLOG communication. Approximate reading time 1.5 ARB’s (Adult Recreational Beverages); Pictures and video only 1.0 ARB’s.
The BIG MOVING Picture
Amalie Robert Estate Vintage 2025 will be remembered as the Diamond Vintage. Diamonds are naturally formed under high pressure over a long period of time. Willamette Valley Pinot Noir is formed in the agrarian endeavor (where duct tape is often deployed around the cranium to preserve structural integrity) over 105 days. While you don’t have to be crazy to grow Pinot Noir, it does help.
While our 24th harvest window was relatively short, we did experience all of the real time agrarian anomalies and abnormalities that we have come to expect from an Estate Cluster Pluck, just compressed into half the time. Think Tricks or Treats. The Great Cluster Pluck is kinda like that.
The Vintage 2025 defining climate characteristic was a very dry growing season. As a dry farmed estate, we do not irrigate. We believe a little drought leading up to harvest helps in stressing the vines to produce higher quality wine berries. Dena thinks balance is important, and that is why she likes to see a little stress in Ernie just before the Great Cluster Pluck.
Fortunately, our vines’ deep-rooted rootstocks are well suited for this type of vintage. Ernie has also become more comfortable in relinquishing the strict “A-Type” control for the more realistic “más o menos” field implementation. The results are the same, and the risk of a stroke is greatly reduced. But in the winery, he is still the iron fist in the velvet glove of HAACP.
The good news is that there was very little instances of rot. The wine berries we cluster plucked from their mother vines were as pristine as a Type IIa diamond. And you only get one shot at it. Wine is the only agrarian Adult Recreational Beverage that is made once a year, and each vintage is unique. So, we do our best not to “bucket up!”
Moving right along to our whole cluster fermentations, you should smell what they look like from here! The Syrah is the laggard with a “late” October 22 harvest date (normally November, but that was not in the cards this year). It was cold that morning, so the fermenters are experiencing an extended cold soak while the indigenous yeast population builds up to a critical mass.
All in all, nothing to complain about, mostly. Our harvest crews were good, and plentiful. Probably because everyone else was finished Cluster Plucking by the time we got started, or used machine harvesters. And we had a little help from Hoot and Anny. They are our resident fawns from this vintage that helped us out with our pre-harvest quality control.
The (only?) nice thing about having old, well used equipment is that when it comes time for an immediate Right Farming Now (RFN) repair, you have learned all of their tricks. And you know just where in the agricultural supply chain to find and expedite the parts you need. The not so nice thing is that at 25 years in, some of those manufacturers and parts no longer exist. And if you are on hold for more than 2 minutes, you have called the wrong parts guy.
In This Communication:
The BIG MOVING Picture
Cyber Monday Offer
Bud Break and the Dawn of Vintage 2025
The Hidden Joy of Canopy Management (We are Still Looking)
The Dog Days of Summer
The Grease Pit of Eternal Peril and Equipment Repair
A Cluster Plucking Good Time!
The Numbers, A Very Arid Adventure
Cyber Monday Offer
Cyber Monday Offer is available NOW! We are offering $550 cases of wine! Choose from any of the wines in our Cyber Monday cart, and they are yours for a cool $550. Mix or match, any vintage and variety. If it is in the cart, then it is available as a $550 case. If commitment is not really your thing, then choose 6 bottles for $275. Or, you could wait for Santa... Clearly the Great Pumpkin thing did not work out.
Click on the Big Blue Button to select your Cyber Monday wines! Add the “Cyber Monday 12” or the “Cyber Monday 6” option to your cart and Dena will apply your discounts manually and confirm all orders before shipping. Limited availability, first come first served.
Pick-up at the winery is available. Shipping options include a $50 flat rate ground shipping to the east coast and $40 flat rate shipping to the west coast on 12 bottle cases.
We suggest using a UPS or FedEx drop point. This allows for a climate controlled facility to receive and hold your wine. Another benefit is minimized travel exposure and ability to collect your wine at your leisure.
Bud Break and the Dawn of Vintage 2025
Springtime in the Willamette Valley is full of promise. The new vintage is upon us, and therapy has helped to resolve the most nagging issues from the prior agrarian year. And therapy, like pain, is personal.
Some may choose Pinot Noir therapy; others may seek more professional help. At the end of the day, it is very important to celebrate your victories and accept the fact that experience is what you get when you don’t get what you want. You have done your best (despite yourself and helpful others) and have the wisdom of another year under your belt.
The vines, of course, are oblivious to your emotional needs. They simply know that when the climate warms up in the spring, they start to show above ground growth. And that is encouraging - at first. All (almost all) of those apparent dead sticks that you have spent all winter pruning, are now sporting little green shoots of life! Then it hits you. The roller coaster of canopy management starts on the next page of the calendar!
The agrarian endeavor surely was the precursor to computer programming. Boot up! To be a successful agrarian, you must have a program in your mind that takes your piece of dirt, and whatever it is that you re trying to grow on it, from the beginning of the growing season to a successful ending. This is ideally called a harvest. Gleaning is another option, albeit not a desirable one. We will leave sales out of it for now.
In computer programming, you are matching wits with a machine that only knows what you tell it, and an end user. End users, like vines, have their own ideas about how your program should work. In the agrarian endeavor, you use pruning to clip, snip and otherwise remove growing options that the vines may employ to thwart your program. We are not so empowered with end users.
Once all of the coding errors are corrected, a computer program compiles. Once all of the logic errors are remedied, it can then go into production. A successful computer program can run for a very, very long time with very little to no human intervention. Think ATM machines or calculators (modern day operating systems not so much).
When an agrarian program is developed, it is tested out for the first few years in situ. Depending upon the size of the endeavor, a crew of humans may be necessary to carry out the implementation. Implementation errors (if discovered in time) are corrected in real time. Logic errors are more difficult to identify and are often only detected at the end of the growing season, or the 5, 10 or 15 year mark. Corrections are often associated with the word “Damnit!” (rhymes with Willamette) and are time and capital intensive.
And then… Unlike a computer that runs your program the same way every time, you are faced with Ms. Nature who never does anything the same way twice. She will be the one to compile and run your program each year. And you had better be ready to patch some code in real time if it looks like frost, or drought or heat dome or atmospheric river. There are volcanoes all along the I-5 corridor and wouldn’t it be a shame if your entire year’s work was covered in volcanic ash or blanketed with wildfire smoke. And what about those tectonic plates we are all sitting on?
So it goes, each and every year. And yet, we endeavor to persevere. Living’ the dream, so you don’t have to!
The Hidden Joy of Canopy Management (We Are Still Looking)
The newfound goodness of spring quickly turns to arduous field work in the form of canopy management. Canopy management is a feel good term that represents a significant amount of hand labor. And wires, miles and miles of trellis wires.
The general idea is that canopy management, when done properly, provides an open environment allowing air circulation and sunlight around your wine berries so they do not succumb to rot. And thus, you can make wine that people actually enjoy consuming. Less discerning alternatives run to wine distillation and industrial fuel.
If you start canopy management too early, the shoots are too short to tuck into the wires. And while you would think this would take less time, it never seems to. If you wait a little longer, some of the shoots will be just the right length, the ones at the end of the vine will be too long, and the ones at the head will be too short. And if you can’t get a crew, well the vines seem to grow extra fast.
Right about halfway through tucking shoots into the second and sometimes third wires simultaneously, flowers magically appear. This is Ms. Nature having you on. It is the mental equivalent of that odd feeling you get in the seat of your pants from someone’s boot.
In other words, you are lagging behind. And that is because once you see those flowers, you have 105 days, and counting, before the Great Cluster Pluck is set upon you. It may not be exactly 105 days, but that is when it gets real.
When all of the shoots are tucked into the three sets of catch wires AND the catch wires are clipped together, then and only then does the enforcer appear on the scene. Its time to hedge! The idea here is to remove the growing tips from the shoots so that they redirect their energy into ripening wine berries so we can ferment the sugar out of them and make palatable wine.
Once a year, we mount the French hedger on the Italian tractor, with the Oregonian flail mower out the back. Then it is second gear overdrive for 35 acres of tough love. It used to be third gear underdrive, but the gopher mounds never really go away, they accumulate over time. Think of them as nature’s little speed bumps for farmers. The red-tail hawks do catch a few from time to time, but the pocket gopher is a worthy adversary. Friends come, friends go, gopher mounds accumulate.
And the hedge pass is not just a onetime thing. No. Depending on the growing season and available soil moisture, this is at least two passes, sometimes three and a touch up for a few overly vigorous spots. Adult Recreational Beverage consumption runs high during this phase of the growing season. Especially if you break a wheel, in the middle of the row, on the steepest part of the field, but that hasn’t happened in a few years now.
The Dog Days of Summer
Vintage 2025 was dry. There was very little rainfall in the spring, and virtually nothing during the summer. Our soil is sedimentary based, meaning old ocean floor, characterized as sandy clay loam. We see this soil type reflected in the size of the rototiller tines before and after a pass through the vineyard. They are much smaller afterwards. But it does put iron back into the soil, so that’s good, right? Goes right along with the 11/16 wrench Ernie lost all those years ago.
The nice thing about this type of soil (Bellpine series) is that it holds water very tightly. The water holding pores in the soil are very small, and it takes the vine’s roots a substantial amount of effort to extract the water. This is opposite of volcanic soils with larger pores where the water holding capacity is greater, but the vines are able to deplete the available soil moisture much faster. The goal is to have available soil moisture heading into the last few weeks of ripening. The alternative is no available soil moisture and the vine robbing water from the wine berries, thus making raisins.
And then it is suddenly September. And we have had virtually no rain. Sure a few days of 110% humidity, but that just makes a mess on your windshield. It does not really put any water near the vine’s roots where it can do us some good. It can however, foster rot in your wine berries if you did a poor job of canopy management and everything is collapsed on the wine berries. Be careful when you ask for rain, you just might get it and the unintended (farming) consequences that along go with it.
The race now turns to the triumvirate of sugar accumulation, aroma and flavor development and time on the calendar. In a perfect vintage (as 2010 is now showing), aroma and flavor would be ideal in the winemaker’s sensory evaluation before the atmospheric river of rainfall arrived, with sugar concentrations set to deliver alcohol at the 12.5% range. The calendar would read early to mid-October
Right. The rains we did receive arrived in mid to late September. Fortunately for us, our vineyard is mostly planted to deep rooting rootstocks that scrap for water. Specifically, 5C rootstock is the most similar to own rooted vines as far as effective rooting depth. If there is available soil moisture, they will find it.
Available soil moisture helps to extend the growing season. This is helpful when the sugar concentrations are going ballistic, but the aroma and flavor are stuck at pink grapefruit. The vine roots continue pumping up water to lower sugar concentration and keep the wine berries developing aroma and flavor for another day. And they did this until we found that sweet spot of Montmorency cherry aroma and flavor. And The Great Cluster Pluck commenced forthwith!
The benefit of planning AND planting your own vineyard, and growing your own wines is that you know what the vines are going to do. You wrote this program and have the advantage. And as we review what got us to 105 days of ripening, you have a pretty fair idea what Ms. Nature is going to throw at us. Maybe not exactly when or how much, but after 25 years at Amalie Robert Estate, we have seen this movie before. You know when to make your move, and when to save your powder for another day.
The Grease Pit of Eternal Peril and Equipment Repair
Before we get into the (mental and physical) heavy lifting of farm equipment maintenance, we have a discovery to share.
Most people old enough to read about the agrarian endeavor have heard of WD-40. A relative newcomer to the market is Simple Green. This is a concentrated cleaner that can be used before WD-40 to clean parts. However, this creates a 2-step process, often times with a lag phase of overnight before both treatments can be applied to the target surface. Thus, farm equipment repairs are delayed, and no one in the agrarian endeavor has that kind of time.
By mixing equal parts Simple Green with WD-40 into a spray bottle, you now have a very effective farm equipment parts cleaner and lubricator all in one treatment. And this non-flammable solution may also be used (inadvertently) on minor scrapes and cuts while performing farm equipment maintenance. Stings a bit though, but only at first. Rinse and repeat for maximum effect.
Now, consider the rototiller. This piece of farm equipment is unique in its inherent design to alert you that it needs maintenance. Other pieces of farm equipment might have a dash light indicating a clogged filter, or escaping steam from under the hood identifying a radiator leak. The rototiller, while not overly complex, simply requires grease and friction clutch disks.
There are a limited number of grease zerk points, and usually a couple pumps from the grease gun everyday keeps these bearings functioning within preestablished operating guidelines. But the rototiller’s main point of failure is the friction clutch. The rototiller knows this, as it just sits there all year long, lying in wait.
The friction clutch is not designed for daily routine maintenance. You know it is time to change the friction clutch disks when you smell the unique and unmistakable scent of burning (over-frictioned) friction clutch disk. Older pieces of farm equipment most likely have organic friction clutch disks, meaning they were made with asbestos. Not only do they smell bad, but they are bad for your health. See Farming, in general.
For those operators not able to recognize the scent of burning asbestos, the rototiller has a failsafe backup system – smoke. Burning friction clutch disks will also emit a cloud of blue smoke to alert the operator that the clutch disks are in need of service.
Blue smoke helps provide a sense of urgency, as in “Service Me Right Farming NOW!” Black smoke usually means you have waited too long, and the transmission is now engulfed in flame. Darn it… The time lapse between blue smoke and black smoke is inversely proportionate to input shaft horsepower. The higher the horsepower, the less time it takes to go from blue smoke to black smoke. As you might imagine, Ernie runs 100 horsepower tractors, because that was as much as he could get!
Now, it is true that any piece of equipment, if operated outside preestablished operating guidelines long enough will eventually become an impromptu smoke machine. However, the potential for spontaneous combustion heavily favors farm equipment.
A Cluster Plucking Good Time!
Get the buckets! Get the FARMING buckets! It’s Cluster Plucking time in Willamette Valley! And so it was September 26 when we commenced a pluckin’. And by all weights and measures, it was a very successful Cluster Pluck. You hope for the best, and plan for the worst. But you never really know until you turn that key in the tractor at 6:30 in the morning. It either roars to life, or belches out white smoke. That’s farmin’ folks.
Now here is when we had the rain. You get the same amount of rain every year around here. And if you don’t get it before harvest, you are going to get some during harvest. The wine berries are not the worry. There is not enough time left on the vine for rot to establish. The concern is traction on the hillside for the tractors and harvest trailers. Gravity flow is not just a winery thing. So, we waited until the sun, and a little breeze, made it safe to go out and get some more. Which we then did.
The last pig down the chute is always the Syrah and Viognier. Actually, we take the Viognier first while the buckets are clean. Once you start the Syrah, those buckets run deep red with juice, and you do not want to put Viognier wine grapes in them. Unless you want to make Pink wine.
That last best day was Wednesday, October 22. Ernie likes to see the calendar say November before he takes the Syrah, so Dena flipped the calendar ahead the night before at dinner. All happy now.
As far as compression goes, September 26 through October 22 was the shortest harvest window on record for Amalie Robert Estate. Except maybe 2001 where we had 1 cluster on a newly planted vine, but a racoon got to it before we did. That also is farming, folks.
The Numbers, A Very Arid Agrarian Adventure.
October proved up to the task of Vintage 2025 by contributing another 147.2 Degree Days. Add that to the 2,714.4 Degree Days through September 30, and you have way too many farming Degree Days.
The high temperature for the month was 91.8 degrees recorded on October 7 at 4:24 pm. And ‘twas the night before the Syrah Cluster Pluck that we recorded the low for the month at 37.2 degrees at 10:12 pm. This explains why the “cool climate” Syrah is taking its sweet time starting to ferment.
Measurable precipitation was 1.54 inches through October 21, providing a total of 5.83 inches for the 2025 growing season from April 1 through October 21. Here we stop the climate accumulation numbers as we have completed the Great Cluster Pluck to our satisfaction.
Willamette Valley Pinot Noir Vintage 2025, still an uncut diamond, but showing great promise!
Kindest Regards,
Dena & Ernie