Because conditions were not ideal for setting a big crop during bloom, we have significant shatter and loose clusters. Without the demand of a large fruit set, the vines look very lush and are thriving, with shoot tips still active. And with lower ambient temperatures, water demand is lessened as well.

So far we’ve had no real heat spikes, just a warm weekend during the second week of June. Last year at this time, we had color in the vineyard after a heat spike earlier in July. This year the weather has been similar to the 2005 growing season, but with a small crop and more shot berries like 2007. I can see slightly different timing between the various blocks and, overall, the effects of virus are not as evident as in warmer years.

I saw just a touch of color in the grapes while walking the vineyard today. As veraison occurs over the next week or so, we’ll decide just how to thin this crop. Right now we’re trimming the canopy by hand so that we can be more discriminating about each vine rather than using just one setting as a tractor makes a pass.

We haven’t applied any irrigation in our Russian River vineyard, and very little in Carneros. I’m also seeing significant lignification – that is, green canes turning to wood – and that’s a good sign that maturation is occurring. The open clusters reduce our worries of Botrytis rot and we’re also seeing very few berries pushed out by tight clusters. In all, this vintage looks very good. So far, that is. The beauty of this business is that you can never truly predict the outcome. That keeps it interesting.

A few months ago, I was pleased to participate in a seminar on terroir at the Central Coast Wine Classic in Shell Beach, California. So I got to thinking about our site, perhaps just a little more than usual.

I was privileged to manage a lot of acreage, including what is now the Donum Ranch, for many years at Buena Vista. And for the last decade, I’ve had the ability to focus on Pinot Noir at Donum, T-budding our vines over to different clones and selections to see what fares best in our blocks. As it happens, one selection from the Alexander Valley has seemed to do especially well on our property, and it has become something of the soul of Donum.

As an industry, we’ve always talked about how wines from different appellations differ — how those made from Russian River vines compare with, say, Central Coast Pinot Noirs. Of course, even wines made from the same block can be manipulated in the cellar to negate the characteristics of site. Yet it seems undeniable that, because we all work with the same assortment of rootstocks, clones and selections, and we all employ the same tools in the vineyard and the winery, the real differences derive from site.

While the Burgundians had the experience of centuries to find combinations that work well, we have in a generation assembled rootstocks, clones, trellising, spacing, water management and cultural practices – all the elements necessary to evolve into the next generation of vineyards.

To truly match plant materials to sites takes so long, and even in California, we don’t replant that often. Yet the past decade has seen Pinot Noir move ahead by leaps and bounds here because we made the major shifts necessary and we now enjoy a track record of what works.

Ten years ago at Donum, we began with one wine in mind, a blend of clones and selections. But that chorus became a duet, and sometimes a solo. We learned to pay attention, noticing what was special in the vineyard and in the cellar. Now we have several Donum Pinots, each a unique and clear expression of the marriage of clone and place.

Undoubtedly, it’s a good thing that we have a whole year to contemplate what a vintage has taught us, to try to understand the dynamics of the vineyard. In the end, we must farm with intention, with the wine we want to make in mind. We must constantly read the season and ask, where are we and what should we do? All we do in touching our 120,000 vines is predicated on caring. And while Kenneth and I may get the credit, part of our terroir is our people, the guys who actually do the work, mindfully converting our intentions into reality. Our team is an integral part of this place, and we are grateful.

The recurrent rains remind us of the 1998 vintage when it also rained periodically until June. The impression is that we’ve had a really wet spring, but the fact is that the year is pretty normal to date. While it has rained regularly, it hasn’t always rained very much. What we recall as wet days were actually periods of sprinkles to steady drizzles, more like annoying background noise.

In reality, our neutron probes reveal some depletion of moisture in the soil. That may be due to more cover crops taking up moisture because they have not been disked and worked in. Our equipment has been engaged instead in repeated applications of sulfur to prevent mildew. Because we use topical sulfur and not systemic chemicals, more rain washes it off and we have to re-apply. Fortunately, the mildew index has not been that high because temperatures have remained cool.

So, in answer to how it’s going, at this point we are behind only in our cultivation. We have done our suckering. Pinot Noir typically produces two shoots per bud, and at about the two-inch stage, we reduce that to one shoot and rub off any extra buds. Our canopies are fairly open and wires have been moved already. Now we plan to stay on top of cultivation and wait on flowering to see how we will address our crop. If the period of flowering is tight, we will thin at veraison (when grapes soften and turn color). If it’s elongated, we’ll take away weak shoots.

Last year at this time, we were almost through bloom, whereas this year bloom is from 35% to 65% completed. The nice weather last weekend helped. If it stays cool, flowering could be as late as the second week in June, as in 1998. That would put our projected harvest around late September to early October. My colleagues growing Cabernet Sauvignon or any other later ripening variety are more concerned at this moment. However, because weather can change and grapevines have their own ways of compensating, we just have to wait and see.

The key in winegrowing is to know up front what your goal is. We are making winemaking decisions in the vineyard right now by adapting to conditions with our goal firmly in mind. We have a long-term commitment to making the ultimate Pinot. So from pruning to bottling, we engage in an integrated process that requires understanding of each step. It’s not about big aha! moments, but rather an evolving body of knowledge and intuition that comes from understanding our tools and our land.

If your goal is to make sound, affordable wines, you can achieve that, but you won’t get great wines. In an overall excellent vintage like 2007, many good wines approached being great. But in more challenging vintages, you must set out to make great wine, and you have to know what you are doing and why.

What is your definition of terroir?

Simply put, it’s all of the physical characteristics of a site. That includes soil, climate (including rainfall, wind and fog) and elements of topography like elevation, slope and exposure. Beyond those physical features, of course, your farming philosophy will also come into play.

What makes a potential vineyard site look promising?

Let’s assume you are in a cool climate region like Carneros appropriate for growing Pinot Noir.  When considering bare ground for a vineyard, you need a clear picture in mind of what constitutes a good vineyard, which, of course, derives from your education and experience. You have to know what you want from the site, then read the land to see if you have it.

You’re really looking for uniformity – similar soils and slopes that lend themselves to being worked as a single unit. You might, for example, observe the growth of cover grasses, noting either their natural evenness or lack thereof. You could take soil samples much as a doctor tests a patient for baselines such as height, weight, blood pressure and pulse rate. You may look deeper into the soil profile with a backhoe pit to discover the degree of soil uniformity, clay content, soil depth or the existence of hardpan.

Often your decision about the suitability of a site will relate to water – annual rainfall, water-holding capacity and drainage. If you’re in a low rainfall area, you may not need as much slope for drainage, or you may be fine farming on the flats, but not down in the swales.

Isn’t it true that Burgundian grand cru sites tend to be on slopes?

Yes, but it’s important to keep in mind that Burgundy and California comparisons are often “apples and oranges.” It is true that there, as here, the slopes are literally middle ground, hilltops are generally leaner, lower vigor areas while the ground at the base of slopes is wetter, siltier and thus, more vigorous. That’s a function of gravity, a constant in both regions. However, with drier growing seasons in California, the amount of slope is not as critical for good drainage.

What made you confident that your sites could yield “ultimate Pinot?”

First, I know them intimately. The Donum Estate comprises three vineyards: Donum Ranch (70 acres) and Ferguson Block (20 acres), adjacent to each other on the first hillsides rising off the bay in Carneros, and Nugent Vineyards (11 acres) in the Russian River Valley.

I have worked with Ferguson Block since 1981. I planted Donum Ranch beginning in 1989 and Nugent Vineyards in 1997. I walked the land until I knew how to lay out units with the goal of uniformity. And now having farmed those blocks all these years, I understand the nuances of how the ground responds.

Some feel that how you balance crop levels can adjust for variations in topography, but I prefer what I think is an easier, simpler approach — uniform units. On the other hand, this is commercial farming, so the units can’t be too small. One of our grand cru sites at the Donum Ranch is the 5.5-acre 4-90 block, source of our new vineyard designate called West Slope. To achieve uniformity on this block, for example, we chose to irrigate the top portion differently than the lower half of the slope.

Our rainy season is generally December through February, and we’ve already had quite a bit of rain this year. Sometimes rainfall ceases, and other years we may receive three to five inches or more in March and April. So we adjust and work with the season. In a wet year, we may mow our cover grasses and let them grow out again. In a drought year, we may incorporate them into the soil in every other row.

What are other methods you use to adjust to the season?

My vineyard team and I will touch each vine eight times during the growing season. Those operations are 1) pruning and tying, 2) first suckering, 3) trellis wire moving and shoot positioning, 4) lateral removal, 5) leaf removal, 6) weak shoot thinning, 7) green thinning and harvest.

Given that we have good ground and carefully tended vines, each of those operations is a tweak, a slight adjustment to the vintage. If we have difficult conditions during bloom and set and a resultant poor set and shatter, that will mean our green thinning will be different – maybe we’ll remove second crop.

If we have a wet year, we may make an extra pass to open the canopy more. If we have a heavy fruit set or wings on the clusters, we may have to manage the clusters so there is no fruit on fruit to prevent rot. Normally we start with ten-bud canes and about 28 to 30 clusters, and we end up with 18 to 20.

So do lower yields mean better quality?

In general, both in Burgundy and in California, lower yields equate with greater concentration in the fruit. We want balanced, evenly and completely ripened fruit. That means that clusters from weak shoots should have been suckered or shaded fruit removed, because they won’t provide the same, uniform composition. With better understanding of your site, the season and the wine you want to make, you will make better decisions.

Your title is “winegrower.” Are wines made in the vineyard?

Yes. The best wines are. Farming and winemaking need to be connected. They are part of the same continuum. Great fruit needs less manipulation so that the wine practically makes itself in the cellar with a minimal amount of shepherding.

One reason we consider this an “ultimate Pinot Noir” project is that there is one vision from pruning to bottling. By being totally estate grown from our three sources, we are heavy-handed on the vineyard side and we really do grow the wine. It’s no coincidence that our winemaker, Kenneth Juhasz, spends considerable time in the vineyards to observe, discuss and taste what we are doing.

The other key factor is doing it over time; we learn something more with each vintage.

All right, how do you drive terroir?

Here in California we have unique conditions in that our summers are dry. So water is the gas pedal. We have excellent tools to tell us what the moisture content is in the vine and in the soil. We can use water to trigger growth. We can offset heat spikes with water and cool the stressed vines. And in a cool season, we can back off. We can adjust to what the vintage gives us.

People have called our wines “elegant.” At first, I almost took offense, assuming that was a polite way of saying they lacked intensity. But I realized that people really meant “balanced,” a wine with an even interplay of fruit, tannin, acid and oak, a seamless wine in which all the holes are filled, but not overfilled.

Many of our descriptors sound like yin and yang: intense but graceful, power with delicacy, concentrated yet balanced. Always we look for prettiness. We don’t want a wine that is tiring, heavy, overripe, over-extracted or clumsy. That’s not the nature of Pinot Noir, not even of good Syrah. We want a wine that is well-integrated, complex but understated, a wine with a presence that engages you without grabbing you, a wine that endures, ages, has staying power and subtlety, a wine that always leaves you wanting more.

What about terroir? How do you drive it? Well, first you are handed the keys to the brand new BMW. Then what? That’s the thrill of it.

This year began with a relatively cool, dry spring and moderate weather that continued through the summer. It occurred to us that the last hot vintage we have had was 2004. While we feared the advent of high heat in late August and early September this year, we merely had a few blips of very warm weather. A quick period of flowering about a week to ten days later than normal in May gave us small berry size along with some shatter (small, seedless “shot” berries resulting from incomplete pollination) which, months later, produces smaller yields but greater intensity in the fruit.

We started picking in the half dozen acres around my house in Carneros on September 5^th, and picked again on the 11^th and 19^th as the various clones ripened in sequence. Similarly, our harvest in the Russian River Valley began on September 15^th and extended over two weeks. We began taking fruit off of our Donum Ranch on September 29, and it was exciting to see the flavors suddenly peak in apparent response to a little heat over the weekend. Kenneth just had to call me from the winery to exclaim how delicious the fruit was as it came in. We brought in grapes from the Ferguson Block just last Monday, October 5^th.

Even perfection creates dilemmas. With such beautiful ripening weather stretching out ahead, it’s difficult to decide to pick. Why rush it? It’s much easier to pull the trigger in the face of an impending heat wave.

With such long hang time, the skins can ripen, the berries taste delicious and you can almost taste how soft the tannins will be – there’s no hint of coarseness. The Russian River Valley fruit was equally gorgeous this harvest, really pretty and very clean. The coolness of the summer reminds me of 2005, and the fruit set, shot berries and small clusters, plus the lack of heat extremes, is very similar to 2007. Maybe it’s something about odd-numbered vintages.

Kenneth said the lower yields, prettiness and sweet impression of the fruit also reminds him of 2007. He feels like a broken record, he said, when he tells how we could pick when we wanted, how we got great color, exceptional flavor concentration, intensity without high sugars, and easy fermentations with everything going dry.

He and John have had a very orderly harvest, giving them time to devote full attention to detail. They can decide to give a lot five days of cold soak, for example, and they have the luxury of not having to make rash decisions.

“This wine almost makes itself,” Kenneth announced. “It would be difficult to screw it up. It’s an awesome year.”

He said our Russian River Pinot reminds him of Oregonian Pinot Noirs at their best – mature but not overripe, balanced and classic, intense but not “in your face.”

The last few nights have been quite cold, and John remarked that while the harvest has been ideal, from the look of the vines lately, he wouldn’t want to have fruit hanging much longer. And there’s rain in the forecast for early next week. We just have a little old Wente selection of Chardonnay to bring in this weekend. It’s a relief to have this wonderful vintage safe in tank and barrel.

As the mercury approached high 90s F., the vines had moved into full bloom. Grapevines are rather vulnerable during this period and require moderate conditions for complete pollination. Extremes of cool, hot, dry or wet weather can interrupt the process.

A good synonym for a vintage is “weather pattern.” Each growing season is a collection of fog and heat and wind and rain events. As wine grape growers, we can’t control the weather, but we do try to react to it in an appropriate manner to obtain the end product we want.

This year, as in 2007, the heat and subsequent rapid and incomplete flowering gave us little shot berries and shatter – when less than ideal conditions cause the vines not to pollinate and the flowers don’t become berries.

Within the considerable variety of Pinot Noir clones and selections in our estate vineyards, there are some variations in fruit set, but we’re seeing lots of loose clusters and small berries. The combination of large and small berries in our Old Wente selection of Chardonnay is often referred to as “hens and chicks” or even “pumpkins and peas.” It’s said that there may be a fertility issue in Old Wente with zinc as a player, but we find micronutrients are generally not a concern.

At any rate, if we were only concerned with yields, with crop tonnage, shatter might be a big negative, but instead we are excited. As in 2007, this could be the making of an excellent vintage quality-wise. Loose clusters and small berries can translate into more even ripeness, a low probability of rot due to increased air flow, and higher skin-to-pulp ratios in the berries which concentrates flavors and aromas.

Most of June was mild and uneventful with a small heat spike at the end, and July has been similar, although we have had high 90s during this past week. Our relative humidity has been good as well.

Ten days ago as I walked the vineyards, I saw no signs of virus showing. A few days ago after some heat stress, it began to show up. I’ve also seen the first signs of color (veraison), but it’s less than one percent of the crop. It will be interesting to keep track of how many days it takes to reach 25%, 50% and 90+%.

With more humidity this year, we’ve seen higher mildew pressure. I have quite a bit in the roses around my house and they are always a good indicator. Chardonnay is particularly sensitive, so we made sure to have our canopies opened up for air circulation by the 4th of July weekend. We pulled leaves early and the fruit looks clean. It’s funny, today when we talk of quality, we don’t even think about clean fruit. It has become the standard.

I mentioned earlier the actions growers can take. Our primary tool of control is water. On the technical side, we have great tools to aid us in irrigating. We measure leaf water potential (LWP) by seeing how much pressure it takes to push the water from a leaf out through its stalk, the petiole. This reading is much like taking someone’s blood pressure or measuring blood sugar. It’s a snapshot of water content in the plant.

We combine that information with a measure of soil moisture levels – the amount of water available to our vines. The neutron probe is a remarkable instrument that emits neutrons that lose energy when they impact hydrogen atoms in water. A neutron detector indicates weaker responses to neutrons as soil water content increases. We take these measurements weekly.

Recently, our leaf water pressure numbers were running higher than we’d like and they didn’t correlate with the soil moisture numbers or my visual observations of the vines. It just didn’t make sense to me. We had more than adequate moisture in the ground, and temperatures were moderate, yet we were getting LWP readings of 12 to 13 bars. We generally don’t want any higher than ten, and I had expected a reading of between seven and nine bars.

I’ve run into similar situations in the past. In 1999, for example, our sugar sample numbers just flatlined and that didn’t make sense. The numbers need to tell a story. They should not become the story. If the story doesn’t make sense, you have to be alert and apply your experience. While technology and numbers are marvelous tools, you can’t rely on them blindly.

What we discovered was that our LWP machine was reading two to three bars higher than it should have. We borrowed another one to compare readings, and the numbers of the two machines varied by two to three bars.  The readings of the borrowed machine were in line with the visual state of the vine and the soil moisture level.  We have had our machine recalibrated. Luckily, we didn’t over-irrigate (although I would prefer to put on too much water rather than too little because once the plants are stressed, it’s hard to get them back to functioning well again).

We are fortunate to be able to factor in leaf water potential and soil moisture levels with vine transpiration needs and the weather forecast to make our use of water as a tool more precise. But this little incident illustrates that, despite our technology, perhaps our best tool is referred to in the old adage of the grower’s footprints in the vineyard.

You overlay years of experience with the site and the clones and you increase your understanding of what works when and where. Experience is the ultimate tool.

On the subject of both happy and sad occasions, Nabor Camarena, our vineyard manager for the past eight years, left this spring as he reported in our last post. Rather than just announce his leaving, we invited Nabor to comment on his new opportunities and reflect on his experiences here, and he graciously complied. Typical of Nabor, he did not depart before finding his extremely able replacement, Lauro Servin. We all stay in touch and, of course, we wish Nabor every success in his new venture.

Ours is a small, tightly knit team. Every member is important. And we’ve “lucked out” with our two new employees. I will include their “bios” below, but first I want to welcome them and pass along a few informal observations about them.

John Harley, our assistant winemaker, is a young man who has blended in very well. This is his first full-time job following a series of internships in what promises to be a great career. He is fun, enthusiastic and mature beyond his years. He brings great energy and has readily accepted responsibility, taking ownership of his job. We also joke that he is without a past – we were talking about vintages and the fact that the frosts last year were as bad as some in the 1970s. He shrugged and pointed out that those frosts happened a decade before he was born.

John is close to his family, perhaps part of the reason that he has integrated so well with us. In the interview process, John inspired positive reactions from the start. On such a small team, everyone has great responsibility. We simply can’t afford to select the wrong people because consistency year-to-year is so vital for us. Fortunately, John gets it. He’s bright, well-trained, easy to work with, respectful of his co-workers and an astute observer who quickly sees what needs to be done, and he does it! He’s our kind of guy.

Lauro Servin is another self-motivated man who quietly and competently takes the initiative. He is well-respected by his associates for his impressive background. He, too, remains close to his family, having worked for his brother for the past ten years and beside him for the previous decade.

Lauro even brings with him experience developing this very property with me some 20 years ago. It is very satisfying seeing Lauro come full circle. He has learned his trade extremely well, working his way up, becoming fluent in English and always improving his knowledge and skills. We are fortunate to have him, and the fact that Nabor brought him to us out of his deep concern for our team, our vineyards and the wine makes this a special win-win situation.

With such solid, capable people in place, I’m very confident in our future. Here’s a little more information about them.

Lauro Servin grew up in Zamora in the state of Michoacan, Mexico, and came to the United States in 1987. He joined his brother, Francisco Servin, at Peter Nissen’s vineyard management company. Ironically, Lauro’s first job in the U.S. was helping replant what was then the Tula Vista Vineyard, known today as the Donum Ranch. Overseeing the replanting was none other than Anne Moller-Racke, then director of vineyard operations for Buena Vista Winery.

Lauro worked for Nissen for 11 years, then joined Francisco’s vineyard management company for another decade. Former Donum vineyard manager Nabor Camarena approached Lauro about a position as Nabor’s replacement. “I said, yes, I certainly know the ranch!” Lauro says. Returning to the vineyard has brought back lots of memories, he says, including when the roof of the old milk barn (now converted into winery offices) blew off and landed in the driveway. Lauro asserts that he learns something new every day now, and he finds the greatest differences in 20 years are equipment improvements, new vine spacings, trellising techniques and plant materials, and an intense focus on details to enhance quality.

John Harley was raised in Visalia in California’s Central Valley. His father owns Sum Fruit International and consults as a table grape broker for Anthony Vineyards in Bakersfield; his mother does the office work. John earned his degree in enology from California State University, Fresno. In 2005, he took a sabbatical from school to work in the “wonderful controlled chaos of a cellar” as an intern at Wild Horse Winery in Templeton, California, where he honed his appreciation of Pinot Noir. John spent the summer of 2006 working in the laboratory for Videl Companies, then worked the 2006 and 2007 harvests as a part-time cellarman in the Fresno State Winery while attending classes full-time.

From the spring of 2007 until spring, 2008, John spent weekends managing the tasting room at Quady Winery in Madera. In the summer of 2008, he spent a month with other enology/viticultural students in a study program in Switzerland that was his introduction to European cellars. Finally, he worked the 2008 harvest at The Donum Estate before joining the winery full-time. “At first I was a little overwhelmed by the freedom,” he says. “The happy surprise is that everyone here is highly motivated, feels heard by the others, willingly takes the reins and has the same goal – to get even better.”

At first glance, everyone commented that the wines have great color. Phil suggested that I summarize the vintage and comment on the difficulties. Well, we had a little of everything – from frost, heat and drought to fire and smoke.

When the heat came in early September, we were still at fairly low sugar levels and we rode it out. As soon as temperatures dropped, the fruit relaxed and sugars dipped as well. A month of hang time ensued, with very slow (almost imperceptible) ripening, certainly not the normal curve. Something a little different occurred. We let our fruit hang into October until it was pretty clear it wasn’t likely to progress much further and needed to come in. You would have thought our sugars would be 27 or 28 degrees Brix, but in reality we finished from 24 to 25.

So we had our customary first tasting after completion of malolactic fermentation – a secondary bacterial fermentation that converts malic acid (think crisp apples) to the softer lactic acid (think milk). And speaking of acids, we felt that overall the 2008 wines are slightly more angular with brighter acidity than the 2007 vintage. As the 2008 vintage was slow to ripen in the vineyard, so it is a little slower developing in the cellar. These are not lean wines, just different. The flesh is there underneath, similar to our 2006 vintage Pinots which have evolved into very beautiful wines.

The 2007s seemed to spring forth fully formed and we had a clear picture of what would happen. The blends practically made themselves. With the 2008s, we’ll wait a little longer, working to familiarize ourselves with the wines until we have another panel tasting in April.

We began the tasting, by the way, with several lots of our Chardonnay clones and selections, all of which were very harmonious and showed beautifully. The classical music playing in the background was really a wonderful accompaniment. I recommend the pairing of violins with Chardonnays.

Kenneth reports that all of the wines are good and stable, so he can relax. We carefully watched a couple of our Russian River blocks that were hard hit by frost and then ripened quickly with the heat. Something happens when fruit is stressed that increases the chances of getting a stuck fermentation at the end. Because we are very hands-off and gentle, we try to nudge through and we succeeded.

Fruit from other blocks also went through some weather extremes but had enough time to recover and ticked along ripening slowly. That fruit was very sound when it came in, so overall we had it pretty easy in the cellar in 2008.

It’s a silent time in the vineyard. Our crew is gone for the holidays and nothing is happening. We seeded our cover crop for erosion control and the rain has established it. Now the rain is percolating down into the soils to alleviate our drought conditions.

With all that’s going on in the world, we all want a positive and prosperous 2009. Even though we had a tough year farming, mother nature moves on, and we must, too. The beauty of the practice of pruning, which we begin next month, is that it’s a ritualistic taking away of the past year, a process of cleaning up for a fresh start.

As we move into the new year, we will have a new young man join our team. John interned with us and he will now assist Kenneth with winemaking.

January will bring our annual tasting of the previous vintage with famed winemaker Zelma Long and her accomplished viticulturist husband, Dr. Phil Freese. We treasure the perspective and insights they bring to us.

We’ll also look at various clones and selections of Pinot Noir for some new plantings in our Russian River vineyard. And we hope by late spring or early summer to open a small tasting room in Carneros and offer vineyard tours by appointment.

I will have the opportunity to attend some events, including the Best of the Best tasting in Miami and the World of Pinot Noir. As in any business and industry, there is an annual rhythm.

I’m so glad that a big part of my life is agriculture, because nature sweeps you along in its flow. You have to accept its terms, but you also have to keep your own spontaneity and creativity in dealing with it. I’m grateful as well that our project involves estate grown fruit, because even though, for example, we experienced large frost losses this year, we have to take the long view and not attempt shortcuts that will come back later to haunt us. Our reward will be a deeper understanding of our craft.

We all join in wishing you a wonderful new year.

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!