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.

What is your definition of terroir?

Simply put, it’s all of the physical characteristics of a site. That includes soil, climate (including rainfall, wind and fog) and elements of topography like elevation, slope and exposure. Beyond those physical features, of course, your farming philosophy will also come into play.

What makes a potential vineyard site look promising?

Let’s assume you are in a cool climate region like Carneros appropriate for growing Pinot Noir.  When considering bare ground for a vineyard, you need a clear picture in mind of what constitutes a good vineyard, which, of course, derives from your education and experience. You have to know what you want from the site, then read the land to see if you have it.

You’re really looking for uniformity – similar soils and slopes that lend themselves to being worked as a single unit. You might, for example, observe the growth of cover grasses, noting either their natural evenness or lack thereof. You could take soil samples much as a doctor tests a patient for baselines such as height, weight, blood pressure and pulse rate. You may look deeper into the soil profile with a backhoe pit to discover the degree of soil uniformity, clay content, soil depth or the existence of hardpan.

Often your decision about the suitability of a site will relate to water – annual rainfall, water-holding capacity and drainage. If you’re in a low rainfall area, you may not need as much slope for drainage, or you may be fine farming on the flats, but not down in the swales.

Isn’t it true that Burgundian grand cru sites tend to be on slopes?

Yes, but it’s important to keep in mind that Burgundy and California comparisons are often “apples and oranges.” It is true that there, as here, the slopes are literally middle ground, hilltops are generally leaner, lower vigor areas while the ground at the base of slopes is wetter, siltier and thus, more vigorous. That’s a function of gravity, a constant in both regions. However, with drier growing seasons in California, the amount of slope is not as critical for good drainage.

What made you confident that your sites could yield “ultimate Pinot?”

First, I know them intimately. The Donum Estate comprises three vineyards: Donum Ranch (70 acres) and Ferguson Block (20 acres), adjacent to each other on the first hillsides rising off the bay in Carneros, and Nugent Vineyards (11 acres) in the Russian River Valley.

I have worked with Ferguson Block since 1981. I planted Donum Ranch beginning in 1989 and Nugent Vineyards in 1997. I walked the land until I knew how to lay out units with the goal of uniformity. And now having farmed those blocks all these years, I understand the nuances of how the ground responds.

Some feel that how you balance crop levels can adjust for variations in topography, but I prefer what I think is an easier, simpler approach — uniform units. On the other hand, this is commercial farming, so the units can’t be too small. One of our grand cru sites at the Donum Ranch is the 5.5-acre 4-90 block, source of our new vineyard designate called West Slope. To achieve uniformity on this block, for example, we chose to irrigate the top portion differently than the lower half of the slope.

Our rainy season is generally December through February, and we’ve already had quite a bit of rain this year. Sometimes rainfall ceases, and other years we may receive three to five inches or more in March and April. So we adjust and work with the season. In a wet year, we may mow our cover grasses and let them grow out again. In a drought year, we may incorporate them into the soil in every other row.

What are other methods you use to adjust to the season?

My vineyard team and I will touch each vine eight times during the growing season. Those operations are 1) pruning and tying, 2) first suckering, 3) trellis wire moving and shoot positioning, 4) lateral removal, 5) leaf removal, 6) weak shoot thinning, 7) green thinning and harvest.

Given that we have good ground and carefully tended vines, each of those operations is a tweak, a slight adjustment to the vintage. If we have difficult conditions during bloom and set and a resultant poor set and shatter, that will mean our green thinning will be different – maybe we’ll remove second crop.

If we have a wet year, we may make an extra pass to open the canopy more. If we have a heavy fruit set or wings on the clusters, we may have to manage the clusters so there is no fruit on fruit to prevent rot. Normally we start with ten-bud canes and about 28 to 30 clusters, and we end up with 18 to 20.

So do lower yields mean better quality?

In general, both in Burgundy and in California, lower yields equate with greater concentration in the fruit. We want balanced, evenly and completely ripened fruit. That means that clusters from weak shoots should have been suckered or shaded fruit removed, because they won’t provide the same, uniform composition. With better understanding of your site, the season and the wine you want to make, you will make better decisions.

Your title is “winegrower.” Are wines made in the vineyard?

Yes. The best wines are. Farming and winemaking need to be connected. They are part of the same continuum. Great fruit needs less manipulation so that the wine practically makes itself in the cellar with a minimal amount of shepherding.

One reason we consider this an “ultimate Pinot Noir” project is that there is one vision from pruning to bottling. By being totally estate grown from our three sources, we are heavy-handed on the vineyard side and we really do grow the wine. It’s no coincidence that our winemaker, Kenneth Juhasz, spends considerable time in the vineyards to observe, discuss and taste what we are doing.

The other key factor is doing it over time; we learn something more with each vintage.

All right, how do you drive terroir?

Here in California we have unique conditions in that our summers are dry. So water is the gas pedal. We have excellent tools to tell us what the moisture content is in the vine and in the soil. We can use water to trigger growth. We can offset heat spikes with water and cool the stressed vines. And in a cool season, we can back off. We can adjust to what the vintage gives us.

As the mercury approached high 90s F., the vines had moved into full bloom. Grapevines are rather vulnerable during this period and require moderate conditions for complete pollination. Extremes of cool, hot, dry or wet weather can interrupt the process.

A good synonym for a vintage is “weather pattern.” Each growing season is a collection of fog and heat and wind and rain events. As wine grape growers, we can’t control the weather, but we do try to react to it in an appropriate manner to obtain the end product we want.

This year, as in 2007, the heat and subsequent rapid and incomplete flowering gave us little shot berries and shatter – when less than ideal conditions cause the vines not to pollinate and the flowers don’t become berries.

Within the considerable variety of Pinot Noir clones and selections in our estate vineyards, there are some variations in fruit set, but we’re seeing lots of loose clusters and small berries. The combination of large and small berries in our Old Wente selection of Chardonnay is often referred to as “hens and chicks” or even “pumpkins and peas.” It’s said that there may be a fertility issue in Old Wente with zinc as a player, but we find micronutrients are generally not a concern.

At any rate, if we were only concerned with yields, with crop tonnage, shatter might be a big negative, but instead we are excited. As in 2007, this could be the making of an excellent vintage quality-wise. Loose clusters and small berries can translate into more even ripeness, a low probability of rot due to increased air flow, and higher skin-to-pulp ratios in the berries which concentrates flavors and aromas.

Most of June was mild and uneventful with a small heat spike at the end, and July has been similar, although we have had high 90s during this past week. Our relative humidity has been good as well.

Ten days ago as I walked the vineyards, I saw no signs of virus showing. A few days ago after some heat stress, it began to show up. I’ve also seen the first signs of color (veraison), but it’s less than one percent of the crop. It will be interesting to keep track of how many days it takes to reach 25%, 50% and 90+%.

With more humidity this year, we’ve seen higher mildew pressure. I have quite a bit in the roses around my house and they are always a good indicator. Chardonnay is particularly sensitive, so we made sure to have our canopies opened up for air circulation by the 4th of July weekend. We pulled leaves early and the fruit looks clean. It’s funny, today when we talk of quality, we don’t even think about clean fruit. It has become the standard.

I mentioned earlier the actions growers can take. Our primary tool of control is water. On the technical side, we have great tools to aid us in irrigating. We measure leaf water potential (LWP) by seeing how much pressure it takes to push the water from a leaf out through its stalk, the petiole. This reading is much like taking someone’s blood pressure or measuring blood sugar. It’s a snapshot of water content in the plant.

We combine that information with a measure of soil moisture levels – the amount of water available to our vines. The neutron probe is a remarkable instrument that emits neutrons that lose energy when they impact hydrogen atoms in water. A neutron detector indicates weaker responses to neutrons as soil water content increases. We take these measurements weekly.

Recently, our leaf water pressure numbers were running higher than we’d like and they didn’t correlate with the soil moisture numbers or my visual observations of the vines. It just didn’t make sense to me. We had more than adequate moisture in the ground, and temperatures were moderate, yet we were getting LWP readings of 12 to 13 bars. We generally don’t want any higher than ten, and I had expected a reading of between seven and nine bars.

I’ve run into similar situations in the past. In 1999, for example, our sugar sample numbers just flatlined and that didn’t make sense. The numbers need to tell a story. They should not become the story. If the story doesn’t make sense, you have to be alert and apply your experience. While technology and numbers are marvelous tools, you can’t rely on them blindly.

What we discovered was that our LWP machine was reading two to three bars higher than it should have. We borrowed another one to compare readings, and the numbers of the two machines varied by two to three bars.  The readings of the borrowed machine were in line with the visual state of the vine and the soil moisture level.  We have had our machine recalibrated. Luckily, we didn’t over-irrigate (although I would prefer to put on too much water rather than too little because once the plants are stressed, it’s hard to get them back to functioning well again).

We are fortunate to be able to factor in leaf water potential and soil moisture levels with vine transpiration needs and the weather forecast to make our use of water as a tool more precise. But this little incident illustrates that, despite our technology, perhaps our best tool is referred to in the old adage of the grower’s footprints in the vineyard.

You overlay years of experience with the site and the clones and you increase your understanding of what works when and where. Experience is the ultimate tool.

The vines look relaxed, in great shape for bud break. They have more energy this year, which makes sense following a smaller crop in 2007. And they need the water. Although they are dormant, a cold, dry winter can prove stressful for vines.

Anne and I were talking yesterday, and I told her that this is my 24th vintage. I know enough, but not everything. My job is interesting because it’s a constant learning experience.

I play a game with myself, like a football coach. I don’t focus on the end of the game. Instead, I try to concentrate on it play by play – a five-yard run here, getting into field goal position there. Yes, I have an idea of what a whole vintage might bring, but right now I’m concentrating totally on pruning, and next week, on tying the canes to trellis wires.

As I look back over 24 years, I realize there are many more people making wine now. Many have gone to school and are good at putting the numbers together. In the old days, people made wine more with intuition and talent, but the results were more vintage dependent because they had fewer tools to work with. Today, I think there may be fewer people with talent in our industry. But those who are both well-educated and talented — they are exceptional. Talent also has a lot to do with passion for your work.

Our job in the vineyard is to create components for great wine – the proper tannins, acid, sugar and fruit flavors and aromas. If it is necessary to manipulate the wines in the winery to make up for deficiencies from the vineyard, the wine will be inferior.

Kenneth is very involved with the vineyard. When he began here as winemaker, he was on the bench. He became a good player, then a team leader, and now he’s helping to coach the team. He is very confident in his decisions. I joked with him never to believe he’s the owner, because in football they may have power, but they may not know all they need to.

I watch Kenneth walk the vineyards. He knows what he needs and what he’s looking for, and he has developed intuition. He gets a lot of information from the grapes, and that’s good for our team.

Kenneth really starts getting involved around veraison (when grapes soften and change color). Then he’s like a chef at the farmer’s market or the fish market – he wants to know everything about his raw material. If a chef has the finest ingredients, he has to do very little, but he has to know exactly what to do. I think that’s the role of the winemaker with outstanding grapes.

My position is to make sure both Anne and Kenneth have all the information from the vineyard that they need. The better the information I provide, the more success we will have. Everything in the vineyard system is connected – fog, humidity, temperature, soil moisture, wind. If you are calm, you see it all. So you take it all in, digest it and present your interpretation. Accurate, honest information leads to trust and that eventually makes good wine. Over the years, Anne and I have learned to speak precisely the same language.

So I need to get my hands and boots dirty, be aware, gather information and stay connected with my team. It’s a discipline, a way you live. Larry Hyde taught me to pay attention. I try to teach guys who are learning to ask themselves, why am I cutting? What will this mean?

When you pay attention, you see so much more. And you become aware of the consequences of your actions. When you are pruning one vine, it hardly seems to matter if you make two cuts or four cuts. But when you prune a thousand vines, that’s two thousand additional cuts.

Recently I replaced my water heater, so I had to solder copper pipe. I had never done that before, and that’s a helpless feeling. When I asked the experts, they told me it was easy – yes, for them! That experience was good for me, because it made me more compassionate with the guys who are still learning. And we’re all still learning.

Heavy rains have brought us close to 20 inches for the season, very near normal, which is slightly less than 22 through this month. By comparison, last year we had just over 11 inches to date.

I have been sidelined with the flu, which has seemed ironic during this past week of warm, sunny days. Nabor has been busy in the vineyard, and with dry weather forecast, he should finish pruning our home ranch, The Donum Estate, and nearby Ferguson Block by early next week. Then we start tying.

I’m on the mend, so we’ll head up to Nugent Vineyards next Saturday and start there. The vines are still dormant. Nothing really happens until soil temperatures reach 50 degrees F., the magic number when the “sap rises.” Nothing in the vineyard is swelling, but I’ve seen a few trees starting to push.

The first half of February is pretty early for this kind of weather. We try to postpone pruning as long as possible because that delays bud break and lessens the chance of frost damage. The rains have given us nice cover crops, which, in turn, absorb the rainfall so that there isn’t much standing water. But Nabor and his team aren’t daunted by mud.

The cellar is buttoned up and Kenneth just left with his family for a well-deserved vacation in Mexico, near Cancun. Some wines are still finishing ML, or malolactic fermentation (conversion of stronger malic acid, found in apples, to weaker lactic acid, found in milk). While this winter has been moderate overall, there have been cold periods. Our late harvest put winemaking on a later schedule, including moving ML, which is temperature driven, into the colder months, further slowing it. But everything is proceeding nicely within an acceptable time frame.

Valentine’s Day is associated with the color red, but in the vineyards, there is a riot of yellow with the mustard out in abundance. I feel better just looking at it.

We followed a year of low rainfall with another relatively dry year. Lucky for us, we had neither a hot summer nor a heavy crop in 2007. Next spring, if the soil profile is not refilled naturally, we will irrigate. That’s where our neutron probes are very helpful, helping us to determine the extent of soil moisture and how much we need to add when the ground isn’t saturated.

Still, despite the many advantages of drip irrigation (low, precise and efficient water use, weed suppression), it’s not as if you replenish the whole soil with just two emitters per plant. So there is some flow of moisture away from the artificially replenished areas toward the dry middle of the row. We start taking readings early in the year to assess our situation.

At bloom (flowering) time, we want adequate soil moisture to prevent stress. We also watch the leaf canopy. We want it to be supportable given the season conditions we must respond to.

I hear more and more these days about wells running dry. Fortunately, we don’t irrigate very much. Water needs vary from vineyard site to site, and we have the tools to understand how it varies, so we’re very judicious in water use.

We’re also lucky in Carneros to have secondary treated water (tertiary is high quality potable water) available for irrigation. And the county is working on all the filtration to provide tertiary water in the near future. We realize what a precious resource water is. Part of our sustainable philosophy of farming is to be good stewards of water, too. It’s one way to give thanks.

The flavors are there now, in most cases. The seeds and skins are mature. All the numbers are good except the sugars are low. The canopies are nearing the end of their cycle, so we will have to pick soon.

This has been a dry year, so there should be less chance of mildew or botrytis mold. Yet I have seen more mildew than last year. This puzzles me, and I’m sure the guys from the universities are puzzled, too.

I’m noticing symptoms of leaf roll virus (margins of the leaf blade roll downward; areas between major veins turn red) quite a bit. Maybe the dry and late year has produced more expression of virus. I wonder if those leaves are working properly. We did some minimal irrigating to make sure the vines weren’t stressed.

Virus can be spread by grape and vine mealy bugs – we think the flying males may spread it because we catch them in traps and track their movement. In the past, we have marked virused and non-virused vines and have made wine from both of them. The virused vines produced lower sugars but softer, more evolved textures. The virused fruit actually tastes great, but sugar is a concern.

Anne wants to set up trials in one block, marking the virus-free or slightly virused vines as well as those with medium and heavy virus. We can farm part of each group of vines normally and part of each with earlier or more extreme crop thinning, perhaps one cluster per shoot. Then we can track whether the expression will decrease or increase next year and overlay the weather factor.

Vines are like humans in that we all have viruses, but we can minimize their effect with proper care. We can adjust our farming practices so that the vines aren’t stressed and are able to function and accommodate the virus.

Despite the dry year, all the grapes have remained juicy in this mild weather and with the small amount of water we have applied. In the fruit we have already picked, we are seeing juice in the boxes and bins.

Our cluster counts are good, but yields are down by about a third. We have shot berries, although they are not shriveled as they were in 2003, and there are fewer berries in the clusters.

I want to pick, but a watched pot never boils. We assume responsibility for the character of the fruit, because we do have tools to prepare for and deal with surprises. Winemakers have tools, too, as simple as sorting. We deal with what a vintage presents to us, and we don’t use the vintage as an excuse.

Others have had to pick, but not us. Our sugars were at 21 to 22 degrees Brix (approximate percentage of sugar) when the heat came and now we’re at about 23. We saw a little bit of dehydration, but on the whole there weren’t huge shifts, the canopies are healthy and the fruit is beautiful. We walked our Russian River vineyard on Tuesday, and it looks wonderful, too. Our two Dijon Pinot Noir selections are holding nicely in the high 23 Brix range.

Nabor commented that when the fruit is at 21 to 22, it’s so healthy and intact that it can withstand heat, perhaps because the skins are still strong and resilient, whereas at a riper stage, the fruit is ready to break down and can’t take the heat.

The beauty of this Labor Day heat spell was that the humidity was not too low; it only dipped below 30% on one day. We had taken neutron probe (soil water content) and pressure bomb (leaf water status) readings and knew heat was forecast, so we gave the vines a small amount of water. We don’t apply water during the final week before harvest, but outside of that week, the overall health and function of the vine is paramount for ripening.

The Dijon clones typically seem a little higher in Brix in our Carneros vineyards as well, but we’re still in waiting mode. Rumors are that yields are coming in low, up to a third below normal. If the weather holds – and the next week to ten days is supposed to be perfect, in the low 80s – we should have gorgeous fruit. Waiting makes us a little nervous, so we just take another sample!

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.

My simplest answers are “we farm our land as stewards so that one day our children may farm it” and “we put back more than we take.”

We view our vineyard as part of a whole bio-system that needs to sustain a balance or equilibrium. From Rudolph Steiner’s (father of biodynamics) day in the 1920s all the way back to the Farmer’s Almanac in the late 18th century, farmers operated within their own holistic unit, or self-contained system, and they carefully observed what seemed to affect them positively.

As a culture, we tend to denigrate the planting charts and practices of an earlier era, but with modernization, we also have a tendency to lose touch with nature. Is it so far-fetched that there may be phases of the moon, for example, that cause more efficient times in the ebb and flow of plant life? After all, plants are mainly water, and if the moon moves the tides, perhaps it can produce better uptake in a plant as well.

Farmers in the “old days” learned to promote soil health, and they grew cover crops and feed for their animals and produced their own manures and composts. We are emulating their ways these days, getting away from monocultures.

Today, farming sustainably can involve the best of both Eastern and Western approaches – holistic incorporating high tech. Supporting our strong belief in protecting the environment are helpful tools for analyzing what we’re doing or need to do with no negative impact.

Water use is a good example. The 1970s gave us the precision of drip irrigation. Now we have neutron probes, pressure bombs and evapo-transpiration (ET) data to measure water content in the soil or the vine and reliable weather forecasting to help us plan ahead.

As technology surged in the 1980s, some thought that viticulture (and winemaking) could be computerized, especially irrigation. But, in fact, today the pendulum has swung back to walking the vineyard. It’s an axiom in our industry that the best technology is the grower’s footprints. You cannot understand the system unless you place yourself in it and make decisions based on observations, not on a predetermined schedule or calendar.

The vineyard reveals its condition with nuances – leaf colors, shoot tips, insect activity, sucker growth, gopher activity, weed growth, a leaking emitter, a broken trellis wire. While you may have perceived the vigor of a block from satellite technology — NDVI (Normalized Difference Vegetation Index) photos use seven colors to indicate seven gradations of vigor based on how plants absorb and reflect solar radiation – you want to augment that perspective with your own observations on the ground.

As an observer within the system, you come to understand whether or not a pest or disease is a real threat or whether it hasn’t approached the threshold. We realize that a zero tolerance for a pest in a system where beneficial insects balance them isn’t appropriate. If it is a benign population, it isn’t an issue.

While we farm organically, that’s not to say everything goes perfectly. We recently tried an expensive organic herbicide and it just didn’t work. But now there are a host of organic materials available and the practices we’ve adopted work well, like cover crops, green manure and liquid compost teas to stimulate the soil.

Many practices are dictated by site. Because most of our estate vineyards are located in Carneros, where winds are ever present, we cultivate every-other-row. We’re careful not to overwork or pulverize the ground and are focused on preventing soil erosion.

So we don’t have the table-top cultivation and cosmetically perfect vineyards that you might find along Highway 29 in Napa. With our cover crops, we look more unkempt and have more bugs, birds and gophers within a really active ecosystem. But the result is an equilibrium that we can live with – sustainably.