Life and Death on the Vineyard:
The Blog Gets Biblical:

Easter Lamb, Prayers for Frost to Passover, Vineyard Hardware,

Weather Stations, Frost Looms

History of the Grapevine Part 2: Neolithic to the Egyptian Empire

Week #3 of ‘Year in the Vineyard' kicks off with some sadness and joy-that balance of emotions that keeps us keenly aware that all life is fleeting and that we need to celebrate friends, family (and of course wine) each day that we are lucky enough to be on this precious, spinning planet. Every breath, every taste of pinot noir, every loving touch, is truly a miracle. The Upanishads tell us: ‘When you no longer see the world with the eyes of a child, it is time to close them, like a lotus closing, and make room in this world for someone who sees miracles in everything around them.'

My Grandmother, Esther Burcham, passed last week after a long life of service, teaching, motherhood, grand-motherhood, and great-grand-motherhood. She would have been 90 in October. Sad as it was, my mourning was tempered by the fact that she lived a long and important life: helping to develop special needs education in the Long Beach Unified School District, raising a Down-Syndrome child in an era where retarded children were commonly institutionalized, and balancing service to the community and raising her children to be loving and successful. She was a wonderful woman who packed the Church with mourners. It may sound like the start of a joke, but there were priests, pastors, ministers and rabbis at her service-all paying their respects to a woman whose service to the community transcended any specific brand of spirituality. We should all raise a glass to her memory and be appreciative for the lives she improved with the work of her hands and heart. Let her life be a model of service and selflessness that we can all aspire to sip

You may recall that, last year, our ewe Penelope gave birth to a ram-lamb within twenty-four hours of my paternal grandfather dying. My grandfather's name was Benjamin, and we gave the ram that name. About a week after Esther's passing, less than 48 hours before this blog was published, our ewe Althea gave birth to a perfect (and rare) little black ewe-lamb. You may have already guessed that we have named her Esther, and I offer a picture of our new little ‘Estate' sheep/vineyard fertilizer.

Through the mourning and the trips to services, we are still farming Pinot Noir and Chardonnay for the 2009 vintage. This is what we were up to at Clos Pepe this week:

The shoots keep growing.  You can see from the picture below that the longest shoots in the vineyard are reaching almost six inches, and that they are beginning to develop proper leaves, tendrils and a real growing tip. At this size we start thinking about making the first spray application to combat mildew, which will likely begin Monday the 13th of April. The first spray will also contain a number of materials and organic fertilizers to help the young shoots become healthy and resistant to frost. There are bacteria throughout most vineyards that allow ice to nucleate on the young shoots and fruit-and if we can knock those bacteria out with a bit of copper, the vines will be able to shrug off temperatures that would normally fry their little tissues.

(Actually, frost causes the liquid within cells to freeze and expand like a coke can left in the freezer, bursting the cell walls and causing the tissues to wilt and become crispy.) We will begin with organic sprays of liquid sulfur mixed with copper and nutrients-so with one application (and no extra diesel burned), we will be able to protect the shoots from frost, apply nutrients to feed the growing shoots, and cause organic sulfur vapors to make it very difficult for powdery mildew to gain a foothold in the vineyard. By next week we should see the growing tip even more clearly (this is where the new growth of the shoot emanates), as well as an elongation of the tendrils that extend vertically to grab onto wires (or branches in nature) and help the vine do what it was made to do: climb higher and absorb more sunlight. Why It Matters: Leaf area is the engine that drives growth and sugar accumulation.

We need to develop three to five foot shoots with about 25-30 leaves to be able to properly ripen the two clusters per shoot we're seeing in 2009. Proper nutrition and sprays will keep the shoots viable and green-absorbing sunlight and making the fruit sweet, clean and properly complex.

Vineyard/irrigation hardware is checked, repaired, replaced and tested. This is a picture of the guys that do the lion's share of the labor here at Clos Pepe-the real winemakers: (l to r) Cesar Corona, Miguel Rodriguez, and Felipe Martinez. Here they are seen flushing the irrigation lines to clear out any foreign matter, algae or other muck that accumulated last year. A few days ago they were replacing broken or rusted vineyard stakes, tightening shoot-positioning wires, replacing clips that hold the wires in place, and digging out any broken wooden endposts for replacement. They are also running irrigation ‘sets' on each section of the vineyard (we water in 3 acre increments), and checking all 40,000+ drip emitters to make sure they are properly applying either 1 gallon or ½ gallon per hour. The steepest hillsides use the smaller applications per hour so the water doesn't run downhill away from the vines.

 
Why It Matters: It is vital that each vine receive exactly the same amount of water so the vines grow and ripen their fruit with perfect uniformity. If some clusters are very ripe at harvest, and others still quite green, the wine will suffer. Proper trellising hardware serves as the frame and structure on which the vine can climb and spread out-proper canopy management gives each cluster its own niche space to be bathed in flecked sunlight to improve flavor and to be buffeted with cool winds every afternoon to reduce mildew and rot pressure.

Installation of a fancy new weather station. On Thursday I pulled this weather station out of its box and began assembling the parts as carefully as my liberal-arts mind could muster. And even though there were some parts left over, I'm almost positive that they are meant for affixing the machine to different types of mounts-and that the station (like the Death Star as Alderan approaches) is fully functional and ready to show the Galaxy what it can do. Why It Matters: Having a weather station that correlates data throughout the growing season allows us to look at a vintage with a critical eye and try to determine which weather patterns affect vintage quality. The station also provides very geeky Ag-weather data such as evapotranspiration (ET) rates (calculates how many inches of water an acre of grass would use as a result of uptake and evaporation: applying a crop coefficient for grapevines can allow me to apply the exact amount of water that is necessary for growth without waste-whew-told you it was geeky). The station makes graphs, feeds my PC the data so I can feed it into spreadsheets, measures wind speed and direction, rainfall to .01", but still cannot turn on the frost fans and sprinklers. Oh well, guess my job is safe for the time being.

Frost patrol continues, sleep suffers. You've heard enough about my frost problems, really you have. All you need to know is that so far I've managed to keep the frost from having any negligible impact on the vineyard. This week: Wes: 1, Frost: 0. Keep your fingers crossed and your RSS feed applied to this blog for week-by-week updates. Frost season traditionally ends on Mother's Day-but I'll keep the alarm on a few weeks extra. So, what happens when the Alarm goes off? Last night at 2:13 the sensor hit 38 degrees, the phone rang and I quickly answered and entered the code to stop it from calling me again.

Jeans, shoes and a jacket were groggily applied, I grabbed a flashlight, drove our golf cart down to the frost machines and fired them up, waiting a minute or two to ensure they stayed on, roaring loud as the turbines sucked cold air off the vineyard floor and blew it hundreds of feet into the sky where it belongs. Then I prime the pump station and fire up the sprinklers on the lowest field, and finally go down into the lower vineyard to double check the fans are whirling and the sprinklers are sprinkling. I try to avoid getting drenched. The whole process takes about 22 very cold minutes-just long enough for my feet and torso to feel like ice to Chanda when I try to sneak back into bed and spoon to regain the feeling in my extremities. If the cold has sapped the sleepy out of me, I rely on a healthy shot of tequila or rum to remind my body it can relax. It rarely fails.

Why It Matters: You should know by now that frosted shoots die and the baby clusters are rendered useless. The vines will recover, but produce far less crop. Less crop = less wine and that makes us all sad.

Sheep in the vineyard and orchard. As the vines are uniformly waking up and showing green tissue, the flock of sheep here at Clos Pepe are barred from the vineyard, lest they nibble on the tasty green shoots. During the growing season the sheep focus on keeping the olive orchard mowed, and during dormancy (when the vines are leafless and woody) the sheep are in the vineyard daily, eating cover crop and making wonderful fertilizer. Why It Matters: The sheep are a wonderful symbol of our sustainable focus here at Clos Pepe. The more critters (birds of prey, insects, etc.) that make our vineyard their home, the more diverse the habitat is, and that means the little beasties are so busy chasing and eating each other they have little time to be dangerous to the vines and the olive trees. Whether it's a greyhound chasing a rabbit, a pair of nesting owls hunting gophers for their babies or a tiny wasp parasitizing a sharpshooter egg cluster -diversity guarantees a vibrant and efficient vineyard environment where no single species can dominate.

 History of the Modern Grapevine, Part Two: Man Tweaks Vine, and the Wine Gets Better!

Last week we met the 20 million year old hero of our story: vitis vinifera sylvestris. During the last Ice Age the vine survived in low valleys near Armenia where it was discovered by nomadic human beings as they settled into the area in the Paleolithic Era. Humans saw the fruit hanging in the trees of the forests in the Trans-Caucuses, and began to collect and eat the fruit along with the other crops they found in these amazingly diverse and useful forests. The vines at this time were either male or female, like avocado trees, and produced an inconsistent crop of fruit. Factors such as wind, insects and weather made it difficult for vines to fertilize with consistent results, and humans were hard pressed to find enough fruit to satisfy both their hunger and their thirst for a new product that made their mouths water and their heads feel funny: fermented grape wine.

There's currently two theories for how man first made wine. The first is that it was imitative: many animals, including birds, primates, goats and elephants purposefully seek out fermented fruits and eat them with gusto. Then they act a bit wobbly. The imitative theory supposes that Paleolithic man saw drunk animals and felt left out. They made the process a little more streamlined and collected fermented fruits or fermented them on purpose. The second theory is that wine was an accident-that the sloppy fruit-and-juice leftovers in a stone basin were tasted by a brave shaman or tribe member, and found that the taste was sour, but the effect was euphoric.

Unfortunately we can't pinpoint the date of the first Paleolithic wine because of a lack of physical archaeological evidence. Wine-stained pottery shards and fossilized grape seeds prove that wine was being picked, fermented and pressed as far back as pottery existed, about 8,000 years ago, or 6000 BCE. Many experts believe wine was being made as early as 12,000BCE, and expect to find artifacts to prove it.

The first wines were clearly made with grapes retrieved from trees growing in the forests between the Black and Caspian Seas. Humans would have fought the birds for the fruit as it ripened...so the fruit could not have been very ripe. The wines would be a rustic and acidic rose', as it would have been difficult to get more than 20% sugar by weight, which makes a wine similar to a Champagne base-around 11% alcohol.

The by-products of wine production-seeds and dry skins, were likely composted outside of villages where wine was made. These compost piles likely provided the first grape seedlings that were transplanted into the first domesticated vineyards. Wine archaeologists note that domesticating the grape had a swift influence on the vine's physiology: domesticated vines produced longer seeds-which made it easy to determine if artifact seeds found from ancient wine sites were sourced from trees or early village vineyards.

The Miracle Moment of humanity's relationship with the vine came around 6,000 to 10,000 years ago when the first domesticated grapevine mutated genetically into a hermaphrodite. No longer was it necessary for male and female vines to be interplanted. Yield was no longer inconsistent. Every grape produced its own flowers for pollination, and yields in village vineyards must have skyrocketed. That single genetic mutant vine (I call it the Adam/Eve vine) has produced every wine-producing variety of wine we recognize in Europe today-from Albarino to Zinfandel.

Cuttings or seeds from that vine (which were likely one of the most valuable commodities in the ancient world) moved from Armenia to Turkey, to Persia, to Egypt and to Greece. By 3500 BC vineyard designated wines were being grown and enjoyed in Egypt, and Ancient Egypt venerated winemakers as a very important vocation.

Next week we'll see what happened when the Mighty (hermaphrodite) Vitis Vine reached the Roman Empire, where they took it, and how that single vine mutated into every varietal that makes wine in the Old World.

Thanks again for reading and supporting the year in the Vineyard Blog.  As always, please pass it along to a few friends if you are enjoying it, and you can always strike up a conversation or ask a few questions via Facebook (search: Year in the Vineyard), or directly by emailing me:  wes@clospepe.com