The 2006 vintage was our second year of extended hang time. The unusual heat spike in July produced some kind of stress or damage to the canopy or vine that we didn’t recognize at the time. A cool August and September slowed ripening considerably.

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.

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