Since the end of harvest, I have done some traveling, to New York for the California Wine Experience and to Mexico as well. As we approach Thanksgiving, I marvel at our weather in Sonoma. It resembles “foliage season” in New England, except it’s a month later. The trees and vines still display beautiful shades of gold and red. The afternoon light is an extended version of the “golden hour” that photographers covet. The days have been crisp yet ideal for outdoor luncheons.

Sonoma is so serene and lovely now that I can hardly believe what a remarkable vintage we have just witnessed, one in which we experienced a little of everything – drought, frost, cold, heat, fire and smoke.

In the long period since our last post, the 2008 wines have been developing in the cellar. We were so lucky that we weren’t forced by the heat around Labor Day to pick and that we were able to wait until October. Although we had a crop level even lower than last year, all the wines have gone through fermentation nicely, with just a few behaving a little sluggishly.

The flavors are beautiful. We’ll taste and evaluate the wines more formally in January, but right now I’m certain that there’s not a dog in the whole winery. All are very solid, beautiful, expressive wines with good weight and perfume.

Since harvest, we’ve already had our second rain and we hope for more – the forecast now is for rain on Thanksgiving. The 2007 vintage was light in rain and crop, and 2008 was even lighter in both. But the few inches we have received have started the cover crops and turned the ground between the rows and in all of the pastures a verdant green. It’s pretty to see, especially the meadows with livestock happily grazing and growing fatter, but it’s also good for erosion control in the vineyards.

Now we can look back on a year of difficult decisions – the severity of the frosts, the cold spell in April holding back shoot growth. We couldn’t stimulate that growth; there are no heat lamps to turn on in the vineyard. The shoots never developed the strength to support much fruit. Even if they had several clusters, they often couldn’t carry more than one. Yet we could not change our principals. It’s not just the crop load per vine that’s important. We need to balance each shoot. We also need to open up the canopy to prevent rot. Because the fruit distribution was different, our cultural practices were more challenging.

When the weather did warm up in mid-May, we passed quickly through flowering (bloom and set) which affected fertility adversely. As a result, we saw more little shot berries and one-seeded (as opposed to two- or four-seeded) berries, which translated into smaller berry size and lighter clusters.

Simply put, we had to make different farming decisions to balance a light crop.

As we approached harvest time, we had ten days of heat in late August and early September. At that point, knowing we had a light crop, we had to ask ourselves how much we would allow the Brix numbers (roughly, percentage of sugar in the grapes) to drive our decision. We know that the heat creates higher numbers through dehydration of the heat rather than true ripening. So, do you pull the trigger and harvest? At what point do you gain nothing more by waiting?

In most cases, we waited and we gained. Our sugars never exceeded 24 to 25 degrees Brix and with the return of cooler weather, they went back down. Because flavors are not so measurable and quantifiable, they are more difficult to judge, but we know now that we made the correct decision.

We found absolutely no effect on the fruit or resultant wines from the fires that burned throughout California in late June and July. We have heard that some smoke taint occurred in some areas, but mercifully, it seems very limited.

I was talking with someone the other day about all of our operations, like shoot and crop thinning, to bring vines into balance and promote more uniform ripening – to narrow the range of flavor development so that we don’t get green and over-ripe fruit extremes. I found myself laying out the calculations, as follows.

Let’s assume you have 140 berries per cluster and 25 clusters per vine. That’s 3,500 berries per vine. And you need 500 vines to produce a ton of grapes. So one ton contains 1,175,000 berries. Let’s say you have a special two-acre block and you harvest five tons. That’s 8.75 million berries of low yield, intensely farmed, hand tended grapes. And we’re trying to get uniformity of flavor at the peak of ripeness among all these berries, which will eventually produce about 300 cases of wine. Amazing, isn’t it?

Right now, what I like about the 2008 wines is their great density. By analysis, it seems that our tannins are slightly lower than in some previous years, but they are very ripe, I think, from the long hang time. There is absolutely not a hint of greenness in the wines. There is excellent structure, good acidity and no huge sugars. Indeed, with most of these wines, we were waiting for sugars because we wanted the mouth feel.

In 2006, we had bigger, juicy berries and those wines are just getting fleshier in the bottle now. The 2007 vintage was lower yielding, but the wines seem just about perfect. And the small 2008 berries with their lower skin-to-pulp ratios seem to have great color and density. After a tumultuous year, it’s these kinds of realizations that keep us coming back for more.

Happy Thanksgiving!

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