As we sit here talking at Anne’s, the creek is rising and water is beginning to flow across the road that leads to her home. We need the rain and we have it, about 2.7 inches in less than 24 hours. Downtown Napa looks like it could flood soon. And there have been strong gusts of wind blowing tree limbs off onto the roads.The soil was dry and the water has been soaking in until now, at noon on Friday, it’s running off.

This rain is warm. My sweatshirt got wet, but I didn’t even notice it because I felt no cold. Even in Mexico, around Guadalajara, over the holidays it was quite warm, in the 70’s during the day. We stay awake almost all night there, and although it was very cold from 3 until 6 am with frost on the grass, as soon as the sun rose, it began to warm up. Temperatures ranged from 30 to almost 80 degrees.

We didn’t have this kind of rain here last year. So far, 2008 reminds me of 2006. As Anne wrote in a previous post, most of us who work in the vineyards take two weeks vacation for the holidays. In 2006, we worked for a day or two after vacation, and then we had to sit for a week while it rained. I wonder if 2008 will be like 2006 in other ways.

We just started pruning last Wednesday, the second day of the new year. If it’s not raining, we go in. Mud is part of our lives.

We prepared well last fall. It was so dry through 2007 that we did do some post-harvest watering for the winter. I often compare vines to the human body. If they dehydrate, they are stressed, and the sap can plug up if it’s too dry.

Despite the dry weather, the mild summer did not stress the vines. It was a long season, but the crop was not heavy, so there was not so much demand on them.

A lot of growers started pruning in December. Pruning earlier will cause the vines to push out earlier, but do they want to push the season ahead? No. I think it’s logistics. They want to use their crews.

We prune later to delay bud break for frost protection. The later the vines push, the better. The time between bud break and flowering can vary widely, and that’s driven by weather. We want the most even conditions we can get. The plant doesn’t like a lack of continuity. Once it flowers, the timetable is more precise.

We marked our vines to indicate virus levels last year before they lost their leaves. Now we can monitor how they do. We will prune the same this year, but we’ll thin more crop to offset possible effects from virus.

We have both cordon-pruned and cane-pruned vines. Cane pruning offers more options and so requires more decision-making. Ironically, our prime block for Donum, 490, is on the cordon, and we don’t want to change anything because the wines are so good. We also have some cordon on 4A07 of the Ferguson Block, but the rest is all cane.

In Carneros, it’s often cold and windy or wet at bud break. On the cordon, you leave the first two buds, but sometimes in cold weather, those buds are not very vigorous. On canes, if the first two buds don’t push, all the rest will.

On the other hand, the cordon arms are like trunks, and they store a lot of nutrients for the beginning of the season so that you can get a nice even push. A cane has a much smaller diameter, so it’s like a little seedling, slower, more fragile and more uneven. We deal with that with techniques - making canes shorter, suckering earlier, forcing energy to buds in the positions we want. Our goal is to make the canes look as even as cordons.

Usually the cordon-pruned vines yield less than cane-pruned vines, but last year in a vintage of low yields (40% lower than 2006, 25% less than normal), the cordon vines in 490 produced a normal-sized crop.

Our clay soils retain water and stay cooler, so the vines are typically behind other areas. Also, because Pinot Noir pushes out later than Chardonnay, we can time the pruning by varietal. One advantage to other growers pruning early is that if we get way behind, there are guys available to help us. For right now, we have no choice but to watch it rain.

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