Salisbury Vineyards

July 2007

We are just finishing up our Powdery Mildew spraying in the vineyard with perhaps just one more application in early July. We have switched over to an organic mineral oil, instead of sulfur, for the bulk of the applications plus a small amount of the new generation of fungicides which are akin to adding an antibiotic to the mix. As a farmer that practically lives in the field, we are able to keep a close eye on our vineyards for the conditions and signs of Powdery Mildew. This allows us to stretch the spray intervals and save a spray or two a year; better for the grapes and better for the checkbook!

The vineyard crew has been lifting up the fruit laden canes with the catch wires so that the grapes are exposed to the sun and breezes. It looks like everything is on schedule for veraison, which is the softening and coloring of the grapes. Veraison starts sometime after the Fourth of July, and harvest should start the first week of September for the Pinot Noir. If anyone is interested in picking anytime between Labor Day and Halloween, leave your phone number at the Schoolhouse tasting room. Over all, the crop looks excellent with a normal season for a change, with conditions similar to our exceptional 2004 vintage. We are looking forward to making some dynamite wines this year if everything holds together.

Our family has been in the table grape business since the middle 1800s. We have my grandmother’s written and oral memoirs, where she describes picking wild grapes along the levees in the Sacramento River Delta with her mother and grandmother for shipment to San Francisco via the family’s paddle-wheeler, “The Pride of the River”. Besides a bit of “out behind the barn” wine production, up until 1996 we have stayed out of the winery business because until the mid-1990’s it was a losing proposition. Wineries had one of the highest failure rates of any other type of agricultural operation

During my Junior year at Cal Poly (Ag.Bus.Mgt. & Fruit Production ’64), my dad got sweet-talked into selling some of our Zinfandel to a Lodi winery and just before the winery went broke the next year, the owner called and said, “Ed, maybe you and your son should bring over your truck and load up some wine, because I can’t pay you, and it looks like we are closing down”. So we picked up several hundred cases of some lousy mystery white wine because they were able to sell the Zinfandel, and had a big decision to make - either drain the swimming pool and fill it up with the wine and have one big party or drink the stuff. Well, unfortunately my dad decided on the latter, and so I unfortunately had to drink my share. Even after a 3 year stint at the U.S. Army Armor School, Ft. Knox, KY (1st Lt., Tank Weapons Instructor) there was still some left to drink. My Armenian/Italian brother-in-law to this day complains about having to sit around the dinner table and drink that wine, just so he could date my sister.

A turning point in the profitability for wineries in the States was the “60 Minutes” show in 1992 on the “French Paradox”, which explained why the French could eat such rich food and still not have the heart problems of Americans. The French consume 60% more cheese, four times the butter, and three times the amount of pork than do Americans. It turned out that the large per capita consumption of red wine in France was the big difference. Alcohol, especially wine, for over 7,000 years has been used for its’ medicinal value and is mentioned for those purposes in the Bible almost 200 times. With this information, the winery business in the United States has taken off and has not looked back. We will go into the health benefits of wine in a future article.