Monday, May 5th:
Today Nabor and I stood in a low bowl on The Donum Estate and took in the vineyard landscape. He observed that while cold air normally flows in from the north, it came instead from the south during our recent frost, flowing like water and reaching a fairly high level in this bowl. Once it hit the hillsides, the cold air had nowhere to go but up.

Normally we see differences between vines up on ridges and those down in the swales. Water drains from the ridgelines quickly, and due to their elevation and exposure, vines up there are in warmer as well as drier conditions. But with something like 30 nights of cold weather this spring, the variation is more pronounced. The bowl was affected by continual cold air as well as by two nights of frost.

As we looked around, the vineyard reminded me of the visual effects of flood waters. We could see a frost line. Nabor pointed out that even on individual vines, lower points were damaged while higher points were unaffected. We saw considerable variation in shoot maturity on single vines, and that can be problematic. We can only hope that the vine will compensate and even out its maturation as the season progresses.

Even vineyards with wind machines or overhead sprinkler irrigation for frost protection had problems this year. During the last frost, we had wind machines go on at 11 pm and run until after 6 in the morning. In one instance, the temperature dropped so fast that the gas apparently froze in the line, and the little computer on the wind machine displayed a “help” message.

The fans on wind machines are usually at a height of 40 feet so that they can move air from a warmer layer down to ground level. This time the air was so cold that the fans just moved more cold air.

Usually sprinklers provide the best protection, but not if they run out of water, and some growers have used up their water supply. Micro-sprinklers have such a low flow rate that those lines also froze.

Most of our blocks have cane-pruned vines, which are more flexible, but some say they were hit harder than cordon-pruned vines. With severe cold, the sap recedes. Alternating cold and warm weather can also put the vine in shock. Nabor cut a cane where the shoots were withered, and it was dry. Then he cut a sucker off of the same vine’s trunk and it bled sap. We’re sure the trunks and roots are ok.

We’ll keep shoots even though they appear to be too far behind, because we want to leave growing points and keep the vine in balance. I don’t want to create a few huge canes. We don’t want to rub off damaged buds because they contain back-up systems; there’s still something there that wants to push.

We drove maybe 150 feet to the top of a ridge, and the vines on the crest were really green. Over that short distance, it’s as if we had moved ahead a month in development. In this nice weather, these vines are moving nicely and are close to flowering. I expect bloom in the next two weeks.

Many of our blocks look good. We’re ok and we’re coming back. I expect we’ll get as high as ten clusters (about two pounds) per vine, and that translates to about one ton per acre for those vines with frost damage, whereas undamaged vines normally would produce four to five pounds per vine.

As we looked around from atop the ridge, we saw a lot of green. To a grower, green means growth and that means hope. Nabor said we have to recharge our mentalities. He told me his new computer password is “hope.”

Friday, May 16th:
We’ve had three very warm days in a row with temperatures from 99 to 102 degrees F. The nights have been very warm with a hot wind blowing. Suddenly we are seeing an explosion of shoot growth and the internodes (distance on a shoot between nodes or areas where lateral shoots develop) are extended. It’s as if the vines are on steroids.

In Carneros, the Martini Pinot Noir selection is farthest along in flowering. Lots of calyptra (little caps of fused petals) have come off. Flowering may have been too fast and could affect fruit set. We’ll see.

Our 290 and 390 blocks, hit by frost, are still behind but catching up. Even where there was no frost but the vineyards were cooler longer – in the swales and flats – there is diminished growth, but they are gaining on the vines on the ridges. Overall, the vines are not as uneven as we had expected. If flowering moves along quickly, we’ll see how much the vines have evened out by veraison (when grapes soften and turn color).

We had a dry spring and our probes showed that the soil profile was pretty empty, so we put on water. We’re glad we did, because this heat has not stressed the vines. We have enough water, and we’ll need to stay on top of that situation this year.

I walked the vineyards early today. It was a gorgeous morning with the light playing on the rolling hills and a hot air balloon drifting by. The vineyards look healthy, and I feel very positive. Green is back!

Friday, May 30th:
I visited our Russian River Valley vineyard on Wednesday. The vines looked good – everything has come back since the frosts. We may just get growth and not a lot of crop from secondary buds that pushed out after the primaries were damaged. We’ll see.

Both there and in Carneros, the brief heat spell in mid-May tightened the period of flowering. Within a week, we went from 5% to 100% bloom. I walked our Donum Estate vineyards on Tuesday, and I observed that flowering is finished and the grapes are starting to set. Lateral shoots are pushing out and the vines are moving to the wires. Again, it will be hard to say what we have in terms of crop until the berries size up.

The cool Memorial Day weekend, which included a few hours of modest rainfall on Saturday, has persisted through this week as cloudy mornings are followed by sunny afternoons. As we see more green, we also see less unevenness, and that remains cause for us to be positive.

Thursday, April 10th:
We’ve had a cold spring with some serious frost at the very end of March when temperatures were below freezing for five hours and got as low as 26 degrees F.
Because frost damage can cause unevenness in growth and ripening, it complicates our decision-making. If we’ve lost some crop already, for example, should we thin more crop?

Luckily, Pinot Noir is a later variety and a lot of our vines hadn’t pushed out yet. Our Carneros topography of rolling hills was helpful, because those vines that were out up to two inches were in upper blocks, while the cold air, being heavier, flows into the low swales in the vineyards. Also, our vines are mostly cane pruned, so the secondary buds might be more fruitful and hopefully could make up most of the loss if the primary buds are damaged.

It got really cold and we don’t really understand yet what happened. Could the low temperatures have affected flow in the xylem, the tissue in the trunk that conducts water and dissolved nutrients up to the buds? We only have to deal with frost about one out of every four or five years, so we don’t have the extensive experience they do in Washington, for instance.

Normally we would sucker early, but now we are reluctant to rub off an extra bud when we may need it later. This situation forces you to be creative.

It’s really too early to tell, but I’d estimate loss in Carneros at five to ten percent, whereas in our Russian River Valley vineyard, it might be as high as 20%. We’ll see at flowering how even things are.

Thursday, April 17th:
We walked the vineyards again yesterday. There was one block in the flats that may have lost up to 10%, but everywhere else looked pretty good. We had a very warm weekend, up into the low 90′s, then cold again with another frost alert night on Monday. These extremes are not good.

We have been waiting, too gun shy to sucker, and we don’t like being timid. We want to move ahead with our work. What’s happening out there is a moving, shifting equation, and we have to try to understand the dynamic before acting. We have done all of our replanting and cultivation. The ground is really nice, and we have enough water, although it’s been dry since February.

We noticed that fruitfulness is good this year. We are seeing two and sometimes even three clusters per shoot, and wings on the clusters. So we have made our decision – we’ll begin suckering on Monday.

Monday, April 28th:
We had another severe frost for several nights over last weekend (April 19-21). We were hit hard for the second time on The Donum Estate in blocks 290 and 390, and the fruit is gone. We’ll be training canes for next year there. We estimate our loss at 30 tons of Pinot Noir, about 20% of the yield of the entire estate. In 290, we probably lost 10% of our Chardonnay.

In our Russian River Valley vineyard, the one-two punch did extensive damage where we’ve never had damage previously. A lot of secondary buds had pushed out after the first frost and they were fried. More buds that we thought were pushing are now dried out and not coming.

There have been so many nights with frost alarms this year. Normally we might have four or five cold nights, but this year we’ve probably had 25 over the past two months. People are running out of water. In areas where frost is not common, like our Russian River and Carneros vineyards, often vines have no protection. Where frost occurs more frequently, either wind machines or overhead sprinklers are used. Heavier cold air settles next to the ground, so the wind machines displace it and circulate warmer air from above to prevent freezing. Applying layer after layer of water also protects the tender shoots by constant freezing that, ironically, releases heat to prevent tissue damage.

We have gone from a normal, very promising year to a frost and now a terrible double frost. So far, this second frost is the defining moment of the 2008 vintage. A decade from now, this year may be referred to as the bad frost year. It’s an interesting vintage, and it drives home the fact that you cannot control nature. It’s a weather issue now, but it will affect wine quantity and pricing down the line. We’ll continue to track the impact in future posts.

This rain is warm. My sweatshirt got wet, but I didn’t even notice it because I felt no cold. Even in Mexico, around Guadalajara, over the holidays it was quite warm, in the 70′s during the day. We stay awake almost all night there, and although it was very cold from 3 until 6 am with frost on the grass, as soon as the sun rose, it began to warm up. Temperatures ranged from 30 to almost 80 degrees.

We didn’t have this kind of rain here last year. So far, 2008 reminds me of 2006. As Anne wrote in a previous post, most of us who work in the vineyards take two weeks vacation for the holidays. In 2006, we worked for a day or two after vacation, and then we had to sit for a week while it rained. I wonder if 2008 will be like 2006 in other ways.

We just started pruning last Wednesday, the second day of the new year. If it’s not raining, we go in. Mud is part of our lives.

We prepared well last fall. It was so dry through 2007 that we did do some post-harvest watering for the winter. I often compare vines to the human body. If they dehydrate, they are stressed, and the sap can plug up if it’s too dry.

Despite the dry weather, the mild summer did not stress the vines. It was a long season, but the crop was not heavy, so there was not so much demand on them.

A lot of growers started pruning in December. Pruning earlier will cause the vines to push out earlier, but do they want to push the season ahead? No. I think it’s logistics. They want to use their crews.

We prune later to delay bud break for frost protection. The later the vines push, the better. The time between bud break and flowering can vary widely, and that’s driven by weather. We want the most even conditions we can get. The plant doesn’t like a lack of continuity. Once it flowers, the timetable is more precise.

We marked our vines to indicate virus levels last year before they lost their leaves. Now we can monitor how they do. We will prune the same this year, but we’ll thin more crop to offset possible effects from virus.

We have both cordon-pruned and cane-pruned vines. Cane pruning offers more options and so requires more decision-making. Ironically, our prime block for Donum, 490, is on the cordon, and we don’t want to change anything because the wines are so good. We also have some cordon on 4A07 of the Ferguson Block, but the rest is all cane.

In Carneros, it’s often cold and windy or wet at bud break. On the cordon, you leave the first two buds, but sometimes in cold weather, those buds are not very vigorous. On canes, if the first two buds don’t push, all the rest will.

On the other hand, the cordon arms are like trunks, and they store a lot of nutrients for the beginning of the season so that you can get a nice even push. A cane has a much smaller diameter, so it’s like a little seedling, slower, more fragile and more uneven. We deal with that with techniques – making canes shorter, suckering earlier, forcing energy to buds in the positions we want. Our goal is to make the canes look as even as cordons.

Usually the cordon-pruned vines yield less than cane-pruned vines, but last year in a vintage of low yields (40% lower than 2006, 25% less than normal), the cordon vines in 490 produced a normal-sized crop.

Our clay soils retain water and stay cooler, so the vines are typically behind other areas. Also, because Pinot Noir pushes out later than Chardonnay, we can time the pruning by varietal. One advantage to other growers pruning early is that if we get way behind, there are guys available to help us. For right now, we have no choice but to watch it rain.

Last month, January 2007, brought the lowest rainfall in three decades. As a result, our pruning progressed very rapidly this year. Productivity was up from a normal rate of 35 to 40 vines per pruner each hour to about 55 vines. While the sunshine may have created positive attitudes, the absence of a pound of muddy clay on each boot undoubtedly contributes to greater efficiency as well.

The last two years have been pretty wet, so although we’ve had less rain than last year and are below average, the soils are pretty full. I think we have enough water. Things are beginning to warm up, so we have to finish tying canes to wires.

We’ve also experienced unusually cold weather this winter. Now, with bud break apparently not far away, comes the fear of frost. Our cover crops are not very high yet, but I want to start mowing to get air flow for frost protection.

In the cellar, Kenneth tells me that our MLs — malolactic fermentations (conversion from stronger malic acid, found in apples, to softer lactic acid, found in milk) — have just finished, having dragged out as in Burgundy. In 2004, an early vintage, we were so early into barrel, in September, and it was just the opposite in 2006. The MLs are slower as well, but that’s not a bad thing because a certain creaminess or textural richness comes out in the wine.

Finally, I have to express how green and beautiful it is in Carneros with spring arriving. Life is growing all around, and like childbirth, it puts us in awe. Everywhere there are buds and blossoms, amazing fields of mustard, and tiny lambs. The bright, blue sky and vivid greens and yellows all around us really lift our spirits.