All posts by Gerard van Steyn

Happy 2024 Dear Wine Folk

Please mark your calendars! The next member meeting will be on Sunday, January 28th, 3pm to 6pm, at Bill and Alissa Scanlin’s beautiful vineyard and wine cellar property, 6 Lois Lane, Lafayette, CA.

Five members of the new LWGA Educational Committee will be hosting a panel discussion on what to do in the vineyard in the Winter and Spring. The panelists, who each manage their own vineyards, are Karen Joy Maggio, Chris Maxwell, Frank Orson, Marci Ryan-Nichol and Bill Saupe. Their passion and capabilities for viticulture and winemaking will ensure that this is an engaging and very informative meeting.

Please bring a bottle of wine and an appetizer to share.

The

In case you missed this, please click through the link below to take a short survey that will help Kamyar Aram, UC Cooperative Extension Specialty Crops Advisor for Alameda and Contra Costa Counties in deciding on future programs and services.

Please follow this link to take the survey.

There is a new newsletter for sharing news, resources, and events for crop producers in these counties. 

You can follow this link to subscribe to the Diablo Region Crops Newsletter.

The Board of the Lamorinda Winegrowers Association is establishing a new committee to develop the educational topics and plans for future member meetings. This will be a great opportunity for LWGA members to get more involved. The time commitment for this committee should be fairly minimal.

The Board encourages anyone who is interested to join this committee. If you are interested or have any questions, please email Gerard van Steyn at gerardvs1@gmail.com or David Hicks at dh1780@yahoo.com

The next member meeting which will be this Sunday, starts at 3pm not 4pm, as previously announced.

It will be in the parking lot behind Wine Thieves – 3401 Mt. Diablo Blvd, Lafayette. The weather should be perfect, so please come to share in the excitement about the quality of grapes and wine this year!

Dear Grape and Wine Folks,

Our next meeting will be on Sunday October 8th, 4pm in the parking lot behind Wine Thieves- 3401 Mount Diablo Blvd, Lafayette, CA. What a great growing season we have had this year!… none of the crazy heat waves of previous years. (It seems like it has been a unusually cool year, but I was recently reading that it actually was a normal temperature year, unlike the silly hot temperatures of the last few years. Grape quality should be excellent this year!)

At this meeting we will have an open discussion about the grape growing year. Everyone will be encouraged to talk about their grapes, their viticulture and their harvest (actual or projected). If you have questions, or tried something new that worked or did not, you can share that with the group, and even ask for input. If you had any problems or issues, this meeting will be a great opportunity to bring them up to discuss with the group. And folks can summarize their harvest as in the quantity and quality of grapes, and even pH and TA, particularly if it was different than previous years. There is even some talk about making this a full harvest dance and let loose party… ok that was me, just suggesting 😉

Please park on Mount Diablo or another side street. And it was great to see everyone step up with tasty food and appetizers at the last meeting. Let’s continue this as our new tradition, because who doesn’t like good food, with good wine, and good friends?! Oh and bring a bottle of vino to share with the group, chairs and warm clothing, in case it cools off. Party hats and harvest party attire and party attitude is encouraged.

Greetings, dear wine folks!

Our meetings would be even more enjoyable, if we all got into the habit of bringing something tasty to share. Good wine and good food, after all, are meant for each other!

So please bring an appetizer, warm dish or dessert to share to the meeting tomorrow, July 30th 3:00 to 6pm PM at Daniel and Annemieke Howsepian’s home, located at 3345 Hermosa Dr. off Reliez Valley Rd in Lafayette.  Ph # 925.828.7000

Our next Lamorinda Wine Growers meeting will be on July 30th at the lovely vineyard home of Daniel and Anniemeke Howsepian. Please mark your calendars and reserve July 30th, 3pm to 6pm, for what will be an interesting, informative and fun event. Lamorinda winemakers with award winning wines will be pouring their wines and describing how the grapes were grown and the wines were made. An interactive question and answer session will follow, so we can all learn new ways to grow better grapes or make better wine. There also will be ample time for socializing, and Howsepian vineyard/cellar tours as well.

Secondly, if you have recently won an award for your wine and are interested in sharing your wine and talking about it at the meeting, please email Gerard van Steyn at gerardvs1@gmail.com with information about your awards.

Nearly fifty years after it was first used as a herbicide, Roundup, and its active ingredient Glyphosate, is increasingly being linked to cancer: https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2023/jan/20/glyphosate-weedkiller-cancer-biomarkers-urine-study

New research by top US government scientists has found that people exposed to the widely used weedkilling chemical glyphosate have biomarkers in their urine linked to the development of cancer and other diseases.

The study, published last week in the Journal of the National Cancer Institute, measured glyphosate levels in the urine of farmers and other study participants and determined that high levels of the pesticide were associated with signs of a reaction in the body called oxidative stress, a condition that causes damage to DNA. Oxidative stress is considered by health experts as a key characteristic of carcinogens.

The authors of the paper – 10 scientists with the National Institutes of Health and two from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) – concluded that their study “contributes to the weight of evidence supporting an association between glyphosate exposure and oxidative stress in humans”. They also noted that “accumulating evidence supports the role of oxidative stress in the pathogenesis of hematologic cancers”, such as lymphoma, myeloma and leukemia.

My suggestion is that if your vineyard manager is spraying any type of Glyphosate containing weed killer, or any other chemical-based weed killer, you should stay very far away from the sprayed area for a very long time. It has taken nearly 50 years to start to learn about the cancer risks of Glyphosate. There are no human safety trials conducted on other chemical based synthetic herbicides, so if you vineyard manager is telling you that what they are spraying is safe, please think otherwise, as there is no scientific basis to make such a claim.

There may be a lessor degree of risk from chemical based fungicide sprays, but again, no human safety trials are conducted on these widely used products. So, vineyard owners and their families and guests should steer clear of their vineyards for at least a week after any non-organic chemical fungicide spray.

Happy Holidays, fellow grape and wine aficionados!

Following are summaries of recent viticulture research that are finding that larger leaf canopies, and canopies/trellis designs that drape down around the grapes to better shade grapes from the sun may in fact yield higher quality grapes, and support higher production as well. Seems like the best of both worlds, and its a bit contrary to older research that suggested that 12 to 15 leaves per cane were ideal.

So, to apply these findings you may want to leave more leaves, and to not hedge the vines as much. And, perhaps a more ideal trellis is a single high wire, instead of the VSP (vertical shoot position) trellis that is currently most common in our area. Changing your canopy to single high wire or something else that supports more draping of shoots instead of vertical positioning, is not that difficult to implement, evidently.

https://www.ceresimaging.net/blog/vineyard-trellis-research-climate-change?

The December issue of Wine Business Monthly has two article that make similar findings. I will try to attach them to this email: