How can flavors just go away? It’s difficult to evaluate because it’s so objective – high acids can hide flavors. At 20 or 21 Brix, it’s not critical; we know the flavors will develop again.

Early in the year, we pull off shoots to get a more uniform canopy so we have to manipulate less later in the season. In doing so, we lose yields that we can’t make up. Then this year, we had a tight set that was hard to understand.

Big seeds make big berries. Instead of weighing a normal 1.0 gram, the berries averaged from 1.2 to 1.3 grams. Our cluster counts were not high, so we were glad to get large berries and big clusters. But those quickly closing clusters set us up for botrytis.

The previous year we had big berries, loose clusters and large yields. So we expected the vines to produce lower crops this year. They did, but for different reasons, like botrytis.

The 11-day heat spike in July was pretty brutal, and it came as we were opening canopies. We don’t over-expose our fruit. We remove laterals on the north side of the vine to get filtered light, but this season we got more sunburn than I’ve seen in recent years.

Neither do we over-crop. In our Russian River vineyard, we thinned fruit dramatically – over a third of the crop, which seemed to be about right.

And we waited. There was no human stress from overwork this harvest, but some psychological stress from the stop-and-go aspects. It’s unusual to pick in October, and we went into the second and third weeks, pushing beyond our notion of normalcy and out of our comfort zones.

We got true physiological ripeness ahead of sugar development. Our seeds were really brown – and with a lot of big seeds, we worried about the risk of green tannins. We got lignification (green tissue turning to brown “wood”) of the canes. Flavor development, which had started so early, was just delayed. Then, all of a sudden, it was there again.

Sometimes plant stress and overly long hang-time will make the grapes deficient is some nutrients and produce stuck fermentations. But Kenneth says all the fermentations have finished fine.

Getting good fruit to the winery required flexibility and dedication this year. We had several passes in the vineyard to clean out botrytis, and we set up sorting tables in the field and again at the winery to lay out the fruit and carefully complete the process.

Now that it’s all over, it was a very interesting vintage! Could we have avoided botrytis? Could we have done anything at bloom to artificially produce shatter and prevent the big, tight clusters that were vulnerable? I don’t think so.

We never really know what nature will give us in terms of set next year – it could be totally different and, as sometimes happens with growers, we can outsmart ourselves. Our best bet is to spend money on proven, moderate and judicious practices, then deal with each unique vintage as it unfolds.

After a heat wave in July, flavors started to show in the high ‘teens of degrees Brix (scale of sugar content). Then, rather mysteriously, the flavors flat-lined and almost disappeared. The vintage became a game of “let it hang.”

I think the heat slowed the canopy in its work, making us wait for flavors. Usually we harvest between 24.5 and 25.0 degrees Brix. This year we were closer to 26.0.

Normally we harvest all of our vineyards within a week. This year our picks were a month apart. As a result, we have an array of different wines and styles in the cellar. In general, the acids seem a little higher, as you would expect with malic acid levels up in a cooler season. We’ll have to finish malolactic fermentation to fully evaluate.

The wines are elegant, not as opulent as the 2005s, but with laser-like fruit characters, very focused and wonderfully perfumed.

The botrytis (gray mold) issue could have been huge in this drawn-out, cool year. But we also had more time to deal with it. First we thinned fruit in the vineyard, then we sorted as we picked, and finally, we sorted at the winery. We got 90 to 95% of it out, and we don’t mind a little. In cooler areas, botrytis can add to or enhance fruit aromas.

We did eliminate a lot of fruit and sold a lot of barrels because we had no wine to fill them. Usually we average about 155 gallons of juice per ton of grapes; this year we got 137. That’s close to a 12 percent loss. This year berries were larger than usual, so saignées (drawing off lightly-colored juice) to get color and tannins also lowered yields.

Early in the vintage, I was more conservative with length of maceration (“steeping” skins with wine). As we progressed and I encountered no problems with botrytis, I went to a more typical maceration time. Extraction took a while. Color, tannins and richness didn’t come until toward the end of fermentation, whereas in some years we see it at the end of cold soak (“steeping” skins with cold juice), just before we ferment.

I did very little different in the cellar. I might do a little lees stirring to add some mid-palate richness. The vintage presented some problems, but we dealt with them. It was a little nerve-wracking, but by mid-November, we have very solid, lovely wines, better than I had hoped for.

Burgundy, by the way, had the same year – a hot July and lots of botrytis. Oregon had a warm, but not hot, growing season that gave growers, who often cut yields dramatically, confidence in their crops. Then it cooled and rained in little patches, and people got nervous. A little Indian summer arrived, flavors came on, sugars shot up and they had an excellent vintage – just at the edge of maturity without raisiny characters.

The rain actually refreshed the vines, and we didn’t see any big drops in sugars. Sugar levels have just risen by very small increments this year due to the long, cool season. We had a wet spring, but we didn’t see much early botrytis. The shoots were clean, growth was good, and bloom and set was wonderful. With ample water in the ground and a good set, we saw more and bigger seeds than normal, which made the berries bigger. Our cluster count wasn’t high, but cluster weight was. Normally they weigh 100 to 110 grams, but we saw clusters as big as 200 grams at Nugent Vineyard, although with some dehydration they got a little lighter.

Often when you have big berries, you have big spaces between them, but not so this year. We had big, tight clusters. And that’s important.

A friend of mine recommended a “harvest tart” that she learned to make in Florence. You put wine grapes, no sugar, on a thin crust and just bake it. The seeds become totally dry and create a pleasant crunchiness. You top it with whipped cream and it’s delicious. I tried it with my daughter, Hannah, this year. We plucked each and every berry from the cluster – something we don’t do when sampling. Hannah even counted the berries, an average of 140 per cluster.

What we found was that the second, inside layer of berries was very tight, and some berries had been squeezed until they popped, creating a potential site for infection. That’s the key to botrytis this year. We were caught a little off guard because the big, tight clusters had rot inside that worked its way out.

What could we have done? We can’t open up clusters like we do the canopy. We didn’t irrigate and pump up the berries. So we are left with thinning and careful sorting as and after we pick. That’s how we’ll get the quality we seek.

The wines in the cellar reassure us. We had outstanding flavors early on, then they diminished and then, suddenly, the light goes back on. It’s like stop and go traffic, frustrating, without a smooth energy and flow to the vintage. But looking on the bright side, we’ve been able to concentrate on each block and we haven’t had to rush or panic or give any load preferential treatment logistically.

On the bright side, we did get good flavors in many blocks, and we got the majority of our harvest in before the rain. It’s the fruit in blocks that we usually pick at the end anyway that is still out there. We brought in what needed picking, like some Martini selection Pinot Noir that is thin-skinned and might have fallen apart after enduring the rain.

The occurrence of botrytis this year has necessitated a lot of thinning. Actually, we have a three-step process. First, we drop affected fruit in the vineyard. Then we sort as we pick. Finally, we sort again on tables, pulling out any affected clusters. So, with this added effort and expense, the fruit we get at the winemaking end is clean. Fortunately, we had an abundant vintage, so we aren’t getting shorted badly on quantity.

At my end, fermentations are proceeding nicely, although that cool first week of October affected them. Ambient temperatures were so cool that we had to warm the tanks to get them going. Native yeast fermentations, for whatever reason, have been more difficult. Anne suggests it could be due to botrytis.

This has been a bizarre year for fruit maturity. You may walk a block and ask, “Where are the flavors?” And one day they are there, but maybe not in the next block. This is especially annoying because earlier in the vintage, the flavors were really evident at lower sugars, and we said, “Wow!” We had very high hopes, then flavors diminished, and it’s been a long wait for sugars. As late as we have gone, we will still be picking Pinot Noir next week.

The fruit is not at all tired, however. The Roederer Pinot Noir clone from block 490 that goes into Donum is par for the course with its thick, ripe skin.
Everything is completely ripe, seeds as well, and we could leave that in the tank as long as we wish. It’s just odd to have some wine already in barrel, some still juice and some fruit still hanging out there for another week.

We found Botrytis cinerea, the so-called “noble rot,” in some of our Dijon 667 Pinot Noir blocks. In Pinot, botrytis is far from noble. This just reminds you that, in farming, if it’s not one thing, it’s another. It caught us a bit by surprise, ironically, because with the wet spring, we had anticipated possible problems and taken appropriate measures, opening canopies and applying some material (Pristine) before the bunches closed.

Despite our sophisticated tools, nothing substitutes for what Phil calls “ground truth,” walking through the vineyard and closely observing. We saw some lost basal leaves and some fruit bleached pink. Kenneth was already concerned that color might be an issue because berry size is so large this year. We’re all focused on tannin analysis this year, and color is important because it involves a group of phenolics called complex anthocyanins.

Overall, our canopies look well-maintained. In these higher density plantings, we allow less fruiting buds per vine. We always thin early to one shoot per bud and watch cane size to determine how many clusters we want per shoot for uniformity. Pinot Noir is known to be a delicate variety, and it’s needier at all levels. Pinot requires more leaf surface area per gram of fruit to ripen than almost any other variety – about 25 square centimeters per gram, nearly double the needs of Chardonnay. We need sun exposure to ripen tannins, but all of us agree that super-exposure of the fruit to sunlight is not good. Moderation is the key. Each leaf and cluster should get some light – but it must be filtered light.

Today the sun is shining, but after several days in the mid- to high 90s, temperatures have dropped 20 degrees. We’ll be monitoring this vineyard very closely.