This morning I walked the Nugent Vineyard with our winemaker, Kenneth Juhasz, accompanied by our eminent consultants, Dr. Phil Freese and his wife, Zelma Long. Phil is a born teacher (he taught at the University of California) who headed up viticultural research at the Robert Mondavi Winery for many years. Zelma is a legendary winemaker who also began at Mondavi and achieved renown at Simi Winery and beyond.

We found Botrytis cinerea, the so-called “noble rot,” in some of our Dijon 667 Pinot Noir blocks. In Pinot, botrytis is far from noble. This just reminds you that, in farming, if it’s not one thing, it’s another. It caught us a bit by surprise, ironically, because with the wet spring, we had anticipated possible problems and taken appropriate measures, opening canopies and applying some material (Pristine) before the bunches closed.

Despite our sophisticated tools, nothing substitutes for what Phil calls “ground truth,” walking through the vineyard and closely observing. We saw some lost basal leaves and some fruit bleached pink. Kenneth was already concerned that color might be an issue because berry size is so large this year. We’re all focused on tannin analysis this year, and color is important because it involves a group of phenolics called complex anthocyanins.

Overall, our canopies look well-maintained. In these higher density plantings, we allow less fruiting buds per vine. We always thin early to one shoot per bud and watch cane size to determine how many clusters we want per shoot for uniformity. Pinot Noir is known to be a delicate variety, and it’s needier at all levels. Pinot requires more leaf surface area per gram of fruit to ripen than almost any other variety – about 25 square centimeters per gram, nearly double the needs of Chardonnay. We need sun exposure to ripen tannins, but all of us agree that super-exposure of the fruit to sunlight is not good. Moderation is the key. Each leaf and cluster should get some light – but it must be filtered light.

Today the sun is shining, but after several days in the mid- to high 90s, temperatures have dropped 20 degrees. We’ll be monitoring this vineyard very closely.

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