Week #1: March 22-28, 2009

Waking Up to a New Vintage
(and perhaps a few frost alarms...)

Welcome!

The idea for a comprehensive vineyard blog that follows a single vineyard through an entire growing season came to me as I was driving the tractor last week. Most of what I know about wine (some consider me an expert in vineyard management, wine making, wine history, wine mythology and wine evaluation) I have learned from my time in the vines.

The vineyard is the classroom of wine-a fact obscured by the modern attitude expressed in the major wine publications that the final worth of wine is a point score, a label and an expensive price tag.

To me wine is about relationships:

Wine represents such a multitude of relationships, all starting at the farm:

• The relationship of man to nature, farmer to farm, and the profundity of flavor and nuance a farmer and winemaker can coax in tandem from the ground.

• The relationship of the yeasts to the sugar, and how the results of glycolysis (fermentation) produce such a lovely feeling in my mind and body when I consume wine.

• The relationship of the environment to the vine: how a wine can represent a time and a place by virtue of changing flavors with varying climatic and soil conditions.

• The relationship of human to human, and how friends and family at table with wine seems to me one of our last meaningful rituals in American culture.

Blogger Background:

For those of you who don't know me or my vineyard, here's as quick introduction. My name is Wes Hagen and I have managed Clos Pepe Vineyards since 1996. My introduction to winemaking was in 1990, when I offered my young back to lug fruit and flip barrels for some Italian home winemakers in Long Beach, California. In 1994, I retired from a stint as a High School and College English Instructor and came to live on the newly purchased 40-acre property of Steve (Stepfather) and Cathy (Mom) Pepe, where I continued teaching and finished a three-novel fantasy literature series that was never published. Needing a break from education and living on a very promising piece of pinot noir dirt, I decided to jump into the wine business full time in 1996, when I went to work for Bryan Babcock as a cellar rat. I also took over vineyard management duties of Clos Pepe in 1996, and helped launch Clos Pepe Estate Wines in 2000 (when I married my lovely co-winemaker Chanda).

I was awarded the Central Coast Winegrowers' ‘Grower of the Year' for 2000 and 2001, received a Santa Barbara Green Award (2007) for our family's leadership in environmental sustainability, have been a professional wine judge at large, international competitions throughout California for 14 years, and have grown grapes for and made wines that have qualified us to be called one of the Top Ten Pinot Noir Vineyards in California by a number of national publications.

I have always focused a lot of my attention in this business to communication and education-believing that an educated wine drinker will be more comfortable making buying and drinking decisions. This new blog, describing a year of farming in the Santa Rita Hills of Northern Santa Barbara County, will continue this tradition of passing expertise usually restricted to the trade to the end user (and enjoyer) of wine.

I'll try to keep the writing tight, the information clear, the pictures instructive, and the tone friendly, slightly geeky, but accessible to the layman interested in wine.

Week One: PRACTICES , THEORY and WHY IT MATTERS to PINOT NOIR:

Budbreak (vine physiology), Cultivation (cultural practice), Frost (climate and cultural practice).

What I did this week: As the vines are waking up, I'm spending a lot of time checking the weather for the chance of cold snap/frost, meeting and checking in on the vineyard crew to make sure the irrigation system is 100% checked and functional, driving the tractor to get the vineyard floor fully bare and cultivated, and waking up a few times a night to check on temperatures, and if necessary, start the sprinklers to protect the lowest part of the vineyard against frost.

Geek speak: A cultural practice is a fancy UC Davis term for something we do in or to the vineyard. Plucking leaves or spraying sulfur are both examples of a cultural practice. The purpose of a cultural practice is using human labor and/ or machinery to improve the environment, nutritional status or balance (specifically where the fruit grows and ripens) in order to improve wine quality.

Budbreak: The vines are waking up! March is usually the month when the vines wake up in the Santa Rita Hills. The emergence of green tissue from the dormant vine signals the beginning of the new vintage. The vines have been dormant (leaves dropped off, skeletal and woody like deciduous trees in winter) since November/December, and during this time they rest and go through some changes that allow them to produce crop in the upcoming season. Even as the buds begin to break and the leaves uncurl like a butterfly emerging from a cocoon, the tiny little clusters of pinot noir are emerging as well-showing us that the vines will produce fruit in 2009, and that those delicate little clusters need my protection.

Why it matters to Pinot Noir:  Without buds we have no shoots, without shoots, no fruit, without fruit, no juice or skins, without those..no wine. Then what am I going to pour with my duck confit?

 Note these tiny clusters emerging from the unfurling bud.

Cultivation: The vineyard's floor needs to be bare naked as the vines wake up. We grew about 10 special plants in between all the rows during the winter to make ‘green manure'-plants that will add lots of organic nutrients to the soil and activate the decomposing organisms that break the cut plants down into vineyard ‘food'. We run a cultivator with 48 spinning blades through the soil between vine rows, which gets us that lovely, fluffy bare soil that is full of tons of organic matter per acre. Cultivation is also important for frost control-plants in the vine row will ‘hold on' to cold air if allowed to persist, but a bare vine row will allow cold air to run downhill, away from vines, so the cold air cannot accumulate and freeze our delicate emerging shoots.

Cover crop in all of its furry glory (before cultivation).

 Why it matters to Pinot Noir: As organic matter breaks down into the soil over a number of years, the soil is improved in both tilth (structure) and nutritional content. Healthy soils produce healthy vines and healthy fruit without relying on chemical fertilizers. A healthy vineyard system also beefs up the vine's natural immunity to disease, which reduces our dependency on sprays and chemicals.

 Cultivated vine row, note cover crop is already breaking down into the soil!

Frost: Emerging vine shoots and the tiny clusters they bear are highly susceptible to freezing temperatures. If the cold air on a chilly night has nowhere to go, it accumulates in low lying areas (like a flood of water) and can destroy the tender shoots and fruit. My frost alarm calls my home phone when the temperature outside reaches 38 degrees. I throw on an interesting outfit and drive bleary-eyed down to the pump station, turn a few valves open, prime and start the pump, and water from our reservoir begins to flow through the pump, down the pipes, and the sprinklers begin raining water on the coldest part of the vineyard. If it gets cold enough, the wet shoots will freeze and insulate the tissue to 32 degrees, as it takes sustained temps of about 30 degrees or colder to do damage. Other ways to protect are to use fans that mix the warmer air from higher in the atmosphere-as long as wind is moving at 5 mph, the vines are generally safe to the mid 20's. We also have a Armageddon plan: we have a helicopter on call to wind protect the whole vineyard, but at $850 an hour, I have to be pretty freaked out to make that call. The frost season here in Northern Santa Barbara County lasts from budbreak through about Mother's Day.

Why it matters to Pinot Noir: Dead men tell no tales, and frosted vines produce very little fruit.

Stop in next Friday to find out if the shoots have survived another week of frost danger!  Until then, keep your questions coming to wes@clospepe.com or join Wes Hagen or Clos Pepe (or both!) on Facebook!