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.

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.

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.