A Year in the Vineyard with Wes Hagen, Clos Pepe
Week #2: March 29- April 3, 2009

Wind Machines, A Scary Night, I Love the Sound of Sprinklers in the Morning, Does Pinot Noir need irrigation and fertilizer?

History of the Grapevine Part 1: Quaternary to the Neolithic

Welcome back for Week #2 of a Year in the Vineyard.

The goal for the week is to describe the week's happenings here at Clos Pepe, and then describe thousands of years of miraculous grapevine lore, all in a fifteen hundred words or less! Over the next month I plan to get the readers caught up with the entire natural history of the grapevine-which will serve as excellent context to how we farm pinot noir and chardonnay in the Santa Rita Hills.

What happened this week at Clos Pepe and why it matters to the grapes and wine:

• Frost patrol continues: Monday, March 30th was a very scary night here at Clos Pepe. Our frost alarm goes off when temperatures at the bottom of the property reaches 38 degrees. This gives us ample time to get the sprinklers running, which raises temperatures and will insulate the shoots in ice if the temperatures go into the 20's. The alarm went off at 9:44 pm on Monday night-very early in the night for it to be so cold. We ran sprinklers all night, the bottom of the vineyard hit 29 degrees, which is cold enough to do real damage, but the sprinklers did their job and all the cultivation (keeping the vineyard floor bare and slick) allowed the rest of the cold air to drain away, moving downhill like water, from the young and tender shoots. The scariest moment was 6:30 am when it was light enough to take a drive through each block of vines. The roofs were white with frost and pockets of crystalline white could be seen wherever clumps of grass remained. Would the new shoots (and emerging clusters) be burned and crispy from the frost? Whether by providence or good management (or a touch of both), the vineyard was healthy, green and unscathed. Whew!

Why it matters: Pinot noir emerges from dormancy earlier than most, if not all, red grape varieties-making it very susceptible to Spring frosts. Sustained temperatures under 30 degrees will destroy young shoots that bear the 2009 crop of pinot noir. If burned by frost, the vines will recover with secondary shoots, but fruitfulness will be severely reduced. The vines can recover multiple times from frost, but by the second recovery there will be little to no fruit on the vines. Getting consistent ripening out of a frosted vineyard is nearly impossible, and even though the crop is reduced, wine quality will likely suffer.

• Wind Machines arrive. The installation of these wind machines (Wednesday, April 1st, no fooling!) gives us a wonderful and powerful tool for protecting the vineyard against frost.

Why it matters: We put them at the lowest, frost-prone parts of the vineyard, and when the frost alarm goes off, we fire up the motors and the machines blow cold air from the vineyard floor three hundred feet into the atmosphere, which keeps the cold air from creeping up the vines and warmer air moving through the vineyard. I'm tempted to put on a Flying Elvis outfit and see if I can hover above the machine without being hurled to my death. (Just kidding, Mom.)

• The Spray Rig is anxious. As yet another safeguard against frost (yes, we are still quite freaked out from the devastating frosts of 2008), we have purchased a cocktail of four different foliar fertilizers, that when applied to young shoots, will give a 3-4 degree buffer of protection against frost. The issue is that we want to spray as soon as possible, but much of the vineyard is just waking up and we have leaves on a very small percentage of the emerging shoots. We need to wait until the vineyard has 3"-4" of average shoot length so the sprays can be absorbed by the leaves. Copper will slow the cold's impact on the shoots, zinc, potassium and phosphorous (applied directly to the shoots/leaves of the vine in a water solution) will bolster the vine's ability to protect itself from a freeze.

Why it matters: This is a good example of ‘holistic' vineyard management: focus on making the vineyard a healthy system instead of waiting for problems to emerge and treating the symptoms. Giving the vines what they need to thrive during their early growth cycle is vital in a low-vigor site such as Clos Pepe.

• Water/nutrient status. When should we start watering the vines? Will they need fertilizer this year? We use soil moisture monitors, rainfall totals and sometimes a shovel to determine how much water is available to the vines at root depth. With limited rainfall this year, we will likely apply some irrigation (with some fertilizer added) at some point during April. We had our plant tissue analyzed last year for nutrients during the flowering period (called a petiole sample) and will use last year's nutrient status to make a fertilization plan for this year. Many vineyards don't require supplemental nutrients, but Clos Pepe has very low vigor and almost no nitrogen, so we give them some (mostly organic) fertilizer through the drip system.

Why it matters: Irrigation, while impugned by those who dry farm pinot noir in Oregon or Burgundy, is an amazing tool for controlling vigor, vegetative growth cycles and (late in the season) ripeness. And to be honest, we're farming pinot noir in a desert on the 34th parallel that only receives about 10 inches of rain a year (8 inches this year), so without ground water and irrigation it would be very difficult to farm any fruit in the Santa Rita Hills. Applying water with a drip system is very environmentally friendly and efficient-almost none of the water is wasted, and we can precisely inject the water with liquid nutrients (such as fish emulsion or kelp extract) to build soil structure, feed the vines and encourage biological activity in the root zone. The key is to apply only enough water and fertilizer for the vines to grow the necessary canopy for ripening, and then stop and focus on producing sugar. Nutrients are necessary to balance the vine and keep it healthy-but leaves should never be larger than a man's hand, and should be dusty green-never shiny. A vine should only suffer like an athlete at the end of a marathon-it should be healthy and well-tuned until the last few miles (at which time a little torture may make a more expressive vintage).

History of the Modern Grapevine, Part One: Man Meets Vine

• The grapevine most commonly used to make wine, vitis vinifera sylvestris, has been around in one form or another in the Eastern European/Western Eurasia area near and between the Black Sea and the Caspian Sea for almost 20 million years. The vine's fruit-producing physiology has been alternatively sexed (male and female individuals that required pollination) and hermaphroditic (each vine can fertilize itself) through pre-history.

• The vitis vines that survived the last ice age in deep, temperate pockets near modern day Armenia and Azerbaijan had both male and female individuals. These were the first vines that mankind began to use for wine production.

• As the Trans-Caucasus were first inhabited by hunter-gathering humans (between 30,000 and 12,000 years ago, deep in the Paleolithic era), man was fascinated by the deeply colored grape clusters hanging in upland forests. They were sweet, tangy and delicious and these Paleolithic men and women may have seen animals eating fermented grapes and acting drunk. (Cue the lightbulb over the bored paleolithic teenager's head!)

• The issue of when man first purposefully gathered wine grapes, crushed, fermented and drank wine is contentious. The issue is that pottery came into common use around 6000 to 5000 BCE, and the residue of wine on shards of pottery is one of our first indications of Paleolithic winemaking. Some archaeologists believe wine was being made and drunk as early as 20,000 years ago, but we have clear physical evidence that grapevines were being tended and domesticated by the Neolithic Era (roughly 10,000 BC to 3,500 BC)-and by the end of the Neolithic Era, as it became the Bronze Age, we have clear evidence that wine was being labeled and designated as ‘single vineyard' in both the Aegean and Egypt. Pottery shards with grape wine residue enter the archaeological record around 6,000 BC.

• The human progression from climbing trees (fighting birds for unripe grapes that made thin, terribly acidic rose') to making vaunted wines from famous domesticated vineyards (worth dozens of oxen per amphora) took only a few thousand years, a period we will visit in the next few weeks on the blog.

• Next week we'll meet the single vine that changed the world-and follow the beginnings of wine culture as it moved from Armenia to Turkey and the Middle East, to Egypt, and finally back to Europe via Greece and Rome (and see, of course, what it took to make the world's first cult wine).

Bibliography: 

McGovern, Patrick.  Ancient Wine. New Jersey: Princeton University Press.  2003.  pp. 7-15

Also see:  Chris Jones' book: One Vintage, a Year in the Vineyard.  Sage Hill Publishing.  He thought of this first!  :-)