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.

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.

It is St. Patrick’s Day and, appropriately, there is green everywhere. We had some rain this weekend and a cold front moved in behind it, so frost season is upon us as well, for as long as the next two months.

We have finished pruning and tying the vines, and this is the time of year when we can assess the potential of the vineyards. When the vines are tied, we truly feel that a new vintage has begun because we no longer see unpruned canes as evidence of 2007. Everything is in good order. The canes look very good, soils are nicely saturated and cover crops have prevented erosion.

We have bottled the 2006 Pinots as well as our 2007 Rosé, first wine of that vintage. The 2007 Pinots are almost all through with malolactic fermentations, and barrel orders have gone in for 2008.

Walking through the vineyard, we’ve seen lots of bud swelling in Chardonnay, which is typically ahead of Pinot Noir in activity. We have a couple of weeks to repair trellises or replant missing vines before suckering. After the vines push out at bud break, we cultivate and then we do early suckering when they reach two inches. Pinot Noir usually produces two shoots per bud and we bring that down to one. It’s a wonderful practice that sets up the canopy and determines the caliber of the canes.

At this time of year, we have a little time to do some interesting things. Recently we conducted a blind tasting of relatively high-end Chardonnays. The style seems to be shifting away from the heavily oaked, heavy handed wines of the 1990’s toward crisper, more food friendly offerings with lemony, minerally fruit.

This is also a time to travel. A week ago I poured at the World of Pinot Noir in Shell Beach, California. It was a wonderful tasting, right on the ocean and completely sold out. I poured 2004 and 2005, and there were quite a few 2006 wines there as well.

One attendee pointed out to me that when you taste so many Pinots, the 2005s, including ours, stick out as showy wines with big shoulders. That’s similar to what tends to happen in wine competitions or comparative tastings – the bigger statements capture the attention. I must say that I would probably choose our 2004 vintage to accompany dinner, however, because it is showing such elegance and finesse.

It was fun to see a number of excellent high-end producers like Martinelli pouring. I didn’t get out from behind our table much, but I saw Talisman showing four or five of their wines, and Kosta Brown offering several different vineyard designates for tasting.

At recent tastings, as the afternoon goes by, I have taken to putting my Pinot Noir on ice. Warm wine doesn’t show as well, and it’s not just that the alcohol is move evident. The wine becomes a little disconnected. As in restaurants, I’d rather have the wine a little too cool than too warm. Otherwise, it’s like drinking warm beer.

As for travel, I’m on my way to Germany to pour our wine at Prowein in Dusseldorf and to speak at a seminar before spending Easter with my mom.

I should explain suckering. It means removing undesirable shoots from the vine, whether they are too small or in the wrong place. This practice takes its name from pulling off “ground suckers” or water sprouts on the rootstock. But because Pinot Noir likes to push out more than one shoot per bud, and sometimes three, we remove additional shoots to make sure the canopy has the potential to ripen the fruit. Pinot Noir requires more leaf surface to ripen a given quantity of fruit than other grape varieties. We need a certain caliber of shoot – it must be larger in diameter than a pencil and grow up to the first wire of the vertical trellis to support one cluster. Even with more vigorous shoots, two clusters is our maximum.

Anyway, we had almost an inch of rain this week, and the timing was great. Everything looks nice. Unless we get drastic rainfall, we should be ok for vine vigor.

KJ: My friend just returned from Burgundy where he tasted the 2006’s, and he said they are very similar to our Pinots. Then I got to thinking how similar we have been to Burgundy for the past five or six vintages. The 2001 wines were well-balanced, 2002 was hot and the wines had impressive structure, 2003, hot and big, 2004 balanced, nuanced and elegant, 2005 near-perfect, 2006 wet with botrytis and sorting, but it’s turning out well.

AMR: We’ve had pretty much one of every type of vintage and managed to make good wines from each.

KJ: Yes. Consider 2002 and 2006 – total opposites.

AMR: This year we’re not rushed. We’re ahead in our maintenance work and we have time to organize. We’re finishing suckering, but we’re not ready to move the wires up. It’s getting warmer, but it’s perfect, not overly hot. And we are safe on water. The vineyards look very good.

KJ: What’s intriguing is the role of heat spikes, like July last year. Also, in 2003, we had 100 degrees every month.

AMR: And you wonder how that affects the plant. Perhaps we should not be so aggressive pulling lateral shoots after we move the wires and leave some so that we have more young shoots and new leaves. Then if the heat cooks or damages some leaves, we still have enough to fully ripen the cluster.

The French like laterals and they always trim only. Younger leaves will function fully throughout a long season when early leaves no longer do. It’s always a balance between having the canopies sufficiently open and having enough foliage to ripen the fruit. Maybe we should always prepare for heat spikes, selectively hand-trimming rather than pulling out laterals.

KJ: In Oregon, they don’t remove laterals, but they do a lot of mechanical trimming.

AMR: When you cut a shoot, it does some things hormonally. Healing a wound throws the plant off a little bit, but we have enough time to compensate.

There’s an argument that if you hedge, you should do it often. Don’t allow the shoots to get more mature and thicker. Cut them when they’re lighter. In the vineyard at my house, I do part lateral and part leaf removal, so the fruit is protected but not shaded. How are you doing?

KJ: I’m behind schedule. I’m late in blending because I had to wait so long for the malolactic fermentations to finish. I’m finishing barrel trials and ordering oak for the 2007 vintage. And I’m getting ready to rack some blends before putting them back into barrel. Some lots were stars this year that were not in the past, like blocks 290 and 390.

AMR: They may be maturing, coming into their own. Do you rely on the same coopers or are you using new ones?

KJ: I have my favorites, all Burgundian, like Francoise Freres, Villon, Remond, Mercurie, but almost every year I try at least a few barrels from a new cooper. For example, I liked Hermitage so much I’ve bumped up the amount significantly.

It’s amazing all the distinctive nuances that different coopers can add. I try not to get stuck in a rut, but we have developed a style, and you hope that coopers remain consistent. But barrels are a natural product, and if they vary, you may question the direction of a given cooper.

I have learned how to put different coopers and forests (sources of oak) together. Often with a given wine lot, there’s one cooper, forest and toast level that just nails it, that’s perfect. And sometimes there are coopers that are complementary, that match up well.

I have gotten away from using, say, barrels from four different cooperage houses in equal amounts, because that can be a wash. If there’s a barrel I really like, I say let’s dominate with that wood, then use some other barrels to fill in with nuances. I’ve really come to enjoy this process, and it’s often as simple as picking a favorite.

When you have really good fruit, that in some regards doesn’t need any wood, then you don’t have to build anything with oak. You want a barrel that showcases the fruit and doesn’t intrude upon it.

AMR: What are you accomplishing with racking?

KJ: Besides removing the wine from its lees (sediment), I am starting to assemble the blend. I’m rarely concerned with aerating Pinot Noir. I may rack once, put the wine back into barrels and then rack again right before bottling. Or sometimes I only rack once, just prior to bottling. If I have pulled all my barrel samples accurately to assemble composites, then there should be no surprises in the final blends. On the day of racking, I do go through and smell each barrel to make sure I don’t have one that’s flawed.