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.

In our Russian River Valley vineyard, where yields were a third of normal due to frost damage, the sugars in our Dijon (early ripening) Pinot Noir clones were at a sensitive stage when the heat hit over Labor Day weekend. The heat was compounded by single digit humidity. We decided to push through the hot weather and ignore the Brix (approximate percentage of sugar) readings. We felt we didn’t have quite the concentration of flavors we wanted and that the tannins and skins were still a little green. To compromise matters further, we had some variability in ripening because of the frost. We picked in the second week of September.

We made only a very small quantity of wine and we experienced a little difficulty getting a few fermentations to completion. I’ve heard there were a number of stuck fermentations this year, probably because heat can interfere with micronutrients needed to finish. But I’m happy to report that we have very concentrated and ripe wine that should be spectacular. I found it hard to sleep for a few nights wondering if we had made the wrong decision, but had we picked earlier, I’m convinced the wines would have been a little lean and green.

The situation in Carneros was also a little weird, but good. We went into the heat there with lower sugars, probably due to a combination of clones and selections, older vines and some virus. Then we saw the numbers spike. Anne took it all in. Normally, she pours over the numbers, but last fall she decided not to look at them. She had great intuition and her decision was helpful to the rest of us. We waited.

Moderate weather came on September 7th and soon the numbers plummeted, with Brix readings dropping as much as four points. I’ve never seen that before. The sugars remained fairly low throughout a month of hang time. We completed harvest on the October 3rd.

The wines are thoroughly ripe with fresh, concentrated fruit and great color. They have behaved like cooler vintage wines in the cellar, slower to develop and unfold as they ultimately were slow to develop in the vineyard. They are very solid, beautiful wines. There are no dogs in the winery.

My big fear is having bad wine in the cellar that I have to try to fix. But in the vineyard, I would rather push the limits and make the best decision to pick on the right day. Our interns were going nuts standing around waiting for us to pull the trigger. They looked at the numbers we were getting and scratched their heads, but the development we wanted just wasn’t there.  In the end,

It’s been an odd, fascinating vintage. We have lovely, fully ripe flavors without a hint of greenness, but we still don’t have high Brix numbers (roughly, percentage of sugar content in grape juice) despite considerable hang time. We speculated that perhaps the early September heat somehow damaged the rachises (main stem or framework of the grape cluster) so that they couldn’t conduct carbohydrates efficiently, thus stalling sugar accumulation. But when we cut into them, they were still functioning.

From September 7th until now, we have enjoyed moderate weather with maximum temperatures in the mid-70s to low-80s and the average temperature in the cool high-50s. So even with all this hang time, lower sugars may mean relatively low alcohols in the wines.

The Russian River Valley fruit that we brought in the second week of September has been in the tanks for three weeks now. The Dijon 667 is simply gorgeous, what little there is of it.

For the second year in a row, we have experienced light yields and a very orderly harvest that has allowed us to devote a great deal of attention to detail. This year the issue of light crop is not cluster count but cluster weight. We’re down about 40% from “normal” yields.

There is talk of the economy everywhere. From our grape growing and winemaking perspective, despite the light crop, we had to stick with our philosophy, opening canopies and thinning crop to achieve the utmost quality. These practices are very hand labor intensive, and that translates as expensive, which raises our fruit costs and reduces our margins.

At the same time, the weak dollar drives up the cost of barrels. But the real question for our industry is the economy. What will happen to our friends in the restaurant business? At least we have excellent quality if not quantity, and it may be fortunate for our industry that two short vintages will not mean a glut of wine as we all face an uncertain future.

We’ll control what we can. All of our Pinot Noir is in and we’ll take advantage of more nice weather and pick our Chardonnay blocks sometime next week.

Last week we brought our (early-ripening) Dijon clones in from Nugent Vineyard in the Russian River Valley and also harvested Dijon fruit from the small vineyard around my house located due south of the city of Sonoma.

Yields at both vineyards were very low -  about one-third of normal. Yes, that’s correct, we are off over 60% in tonnage this year. In the Russian River, we had heat with single digit humidity, 7% at the lowest point, which remarkably produced relatively minor dehydration loss. The spring frosts had forced us to thin to promote evenness in crop development, and we had to thin again late in the season for botrytis (Botrytis cinerea, the so-called “noble rot,” but not very noble in Pinot Noir).  Kenneth said the juice he has in the tanks is fantastic, what little there is.

I had thought we would be harvesting in Carneros around September 12-18. The flavors are starting to come in nicely. We got through the hot spell without having to harvest, so now we are presented with the possibility of extended hang time. The purpose of our walk was to see if we should take advantage of that opportunity and whatever risk that entails, or if the fruit could be picked now.

Just to make matters more interesting, there is a slight chance of rain on Friday.
As we tasted, the consensus was that our fruit was almost ready, quite good but not great in terms of flavor development, just in need of a little more concentration. Sometimes the skins felt slightly crisp as we chewed the berries, and the flavors reminded us of an apple or pear just a few days from being fully ripe, no longer green but not quite at the peak of ripeness.

Phil agreed that he tasted a lot that was close but not quite there yet. With foggy mornings and a chance of rain on Friday in the forecast, he was concerned about the high number of small “shot” berries. He cautioned that the small berries tend to be farther ahead in development, and although they are lighter in weight, there are more of them this year. With their smaller size and thinner skins, he was concerned that moisture could cause them to split.

Kenneth agreed that if we see that happening, we’ll pull the trigger. Phil quipped that it would be a good time for the grapes to see the inside of a tank.

I marveled that the clusters were cool and firm to the touch, that they didn’t show much evidence of dehydration. In the wake of the heat wave, the berries filled in again and, amazingly, much of the shriveling has disappeared.

Despite what Phil calls a “diverse population” of grapes on the vines – large, small and a few shriveled from dehydration, which tend to contribute an unwanted jammy character – he said we are sitting on an incredible vintage. With small berries and small yields, we should have great concentration and good acidities.

Kenneth and I joked a lot. He wants to wait a week and I want to pick now. It’s the classic grower/winemaker stand-off and we enjoy the faux fighting with one another as we actually work toward a consensus. We all agree that if we had to pick now, the grapes are in good shape, ready. But with the promise of additional hang time to shift those flavors into high gear, we all feel that’s something we’d like to take advantage of.

We agree that the Roederer and Calera selections could use more hang time, so that if we do begin to trickle fruit into the winery, we could start with the Chalone and Hanzell selections.

Then, in a change of roles, Kenneth admitted that he’s getting antsy and he’s trying to keep his cellar people occupied, while Nabor said we’re not ready and we need a bit more intensity in the fruit.

It’s been an emotional year for Nabor dealing with the effects of two frosts. He admitted being nervous, but he realizes we may have a real opportunity here. We could play it safe and just get the fruit in the winery, but having come to this point, the promise of hang time is enchanting. It could make a good vintage a great one in terms of quality.

We discussed a couple of blocks with “golf balls,” grapes that are dimpled. It seems logical to pick those first. We asked Phil what the fruit looks like in Burgundy when it’s picked, because it’s so much more likely to be beaten up by rain there. Phil said they get to their destination by a different path, achieving more flavors at lesser sugars. I commented that the breakdown of skins occurs earlier there, and he concurred. He said that if you squeeze a berry in Burgundy and rub it between your fingers, it will stain your fingertips completely red. That’s not the case here.

As we continued to taste berries in different blocks, we kept saying we want to give the vines more time. I advocated for four days and Kenneth said let’s check them in a week or so. Then we began fantasizing about taking four days off and flying to Burgundy. Just fly to Paris, drive to Burgundy, walk through a number of vineyards, then turn around and come right home. We were kidding, or were we? Kenneth got out his laptop and began to check airfares. Burgundy is like Oz for us because we always need to take care of our business at the same time of year back here in “Kansas.”

Phil summed up our concerns about waiting: “Is this a gift or a trap?” We concluded that the risks are manageable and the wait is worth it. Phil pointed out that in a year when a number of people were forced to pick by the heat, we have an opportunity to differentiate our wines by waiting. Kenneth said that his instinct is to wait, despite the thumb twiddling in the cellar.

Kenneth and I agreed that we would walk the vineyards together again, probably on Thursday. We recalled how the 2004 vintage was very much the opposite – how we decided to pick before the heat then. Now we have the reverse circumstance. This reinforces our conviction that we can’t farm by calendar or recipe. We need to be completely flexible and in touch with the peculiarities of the vintage. And, as we said in the last post, we always need to be prepared.

There’s no rush at the winery to get lots out of tanks. There’s plenty of time to do the work, so we’re crossing t’s and dotting i’s. For normally high alcohol producers, this year will be considerably lower. Our alcohols aren’t normally that high so they won’t be down very dramatically. Acids are not high, but certainly not low. Nothing tastes over-ripe. It’s all concentrated but fresh with great softening in the skins. I’m not sure of what’s happening south of us, but everything I’ve tasted this year from the North Coast – Carneros, Russian River Valley, Sonoma Coast and Mendocino – is stunning.

This is the kind of hang time I like. In the past I have heard about hang time in 95-degree weather and that makes me really uncomfortable. This year we’re coasting along at 75 degrees. Unless the fruit just screams to be picked, there’s no reason to rush. Sometimes you do walk into the vineyard and there’s great intensity of flavors, ripe skins and seeds, perfect acidity and softening berries and it all tells you – pick it! We’ve seen some of that and should see a lot more soon.

The small amount of rain we received had no effect. The fruit is still sound and will be ok out there until next week. A little more rain could even help break down skins and give us better extraction in the cellar.

My take on the 2007 vintage at this point is that it’s terribly promising and should give us pretty rich wines with nice acids. I usually make that judgment in the vineyard and then wait until after malolactic fermentation (bacterial conversion of appley malic acid to buttery lactic acid) to re-evaluate the character of the wines. Fermentations are all standard and going well, but wines are difficult to judge at this stage. Right now we are bulletproof. The vintage is finished in terms of quality and it is excellent. This is an enviable position to be in.

We have had ideal weather, with temperatures from the high 70s to low 90s, mild nights and adequate humidity (low humidity can hurt us more than heat). All the shoots are lignified (turned brown and woody), the seeds are starting to ripen, and the year has progressed very nicely so far.

This has been a dry growing season, and the soils have dried up quickly. In block 190 at Donum, for example, we dry farmed and didn’t irrigate last year until the end of harvest. After three years of cover crops using up water there, the vigor of the vines has been controlled. Now the neutron probes show that the soil is dry to the bone. There is no reserve in the ground and beginning today, we expect several days of temperatures near or at 100 degrees.

The old wisdom was that you stop irrigation and stress the vines to concentrate flavors before harvest. There was an almost romantic notion that stress could create character in the grapes. Next we began thinking in terms of a water deficit management curve, where we tried to provide just the minimum amount of water for the vine to function.

According to Dr. Phil Freese, our viticultural consultant, research has now shown that after the grapes reach 20 degrees Brix sugar level, you can replace water to an evapo-transpiration level of 100% (calculated using a grape crop coefficient) without changing the sugar, pH or total acidity values.

By not stressing the canopy and providing the water it needs to function in a healthy manner, the vine will attain ripeness levels by producing sugar and not as a result of dehydration. And with the vine functioning during “hang time,” we may get full ripeness at slightly lower sugars.

Now our thinking is that it’s better to provide a little extra water rather than not enough. In practice, we take leaf water pressure readings to provide us with a snapshot, like taking blood sugar, of the vine’s condition right now. If the need is indicated, we’ll provide small doses of water, about five gallons each, then take another reading in three or four days and adjust accordingly. We have to maintain a healthy, active canopy right into harvest, because we often get levels of heat that they never experience in Europe.

For those who would denigrate our drip irrigation, citing the European model, we remind them that in Europe they often receive 10, 15 or more inches of rain during the growing season, and in some famous locations, their vines are “dry farmed” where the water table is just a few feet below the vineyard.

Once again, the individual characteristics of the site totally determine the appropriateness of particular viticultural practices.

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.