-- In which Wes and the crew continue down the righteous path of cold fruit, outrageously aromatic fermentations and long soaks in the Jacuzzi knocking back beers Liam left behind…

Year in the Vineyard, Week #28

October 2-8, 2009

The Light at the End of the Tunnel…

With only a few weeks left in the 2009 harvest and winemaking cycle, I’m starting to notice two distinct phenomenon.  The first is a sense of euphoria and relief.  Maybe it’s all the liquor that I’ve ben using to go asleep at 5:30 pm for a 2:17 am alarm for night picking, but I am beginning to think that 2009 is set to be a ripping success, both in the vineyard and in the winery.   The second phenomenon was unexpected.  Because the end is in sight, I’ve begun to run out of gas a little bit.  In the midst of crush there’s no time to even consider being tired or worn out.  The work load and hours can be overwhelming, so you have to have the RF Scott attitude.  (RF Scott was the second explorer to reach the North Pole, his entire expedition died slow, horrible deaths, but he died while writing in his journal about the glory of dying for Queen and Country.  He was a true Man of Empire.)  So I’m a bit tired, and I really felt it in the 5^th and 6^th hours of the night pick this morning.  Knees were creaking, head was pounding, coffee wasn’t having the proper effect.  But we have a night or two off from vineyard work and the winery work is fairly minimal right now, so I plan to take a deep breath, a number of long, hot soaks in the Jacuzzi, and get ready to finish off the 2009 Vintage with a resolute attitude and a fresh perspective to create the best wines I am able.  As you will see below, the week has offered some challenges and some great rewards.  Although I’m a bit bleary eyed while writing this, I’m confident and excited about resolving the year’s work and starting my regular work again: tours/tastings, selling wine, shipping wine, etc.

We have also taken in a new Intern of the Week:  Josh McCourt of Carlsbad, CA.   We’ve been blessed with a bevy of wonderfully strong, fit and smart interns this year, and Josh is no different.  Not only is he willing to do night picks, night punch-downs and jump right into the madness, but he’s also a very well-conditioned road-bicycler who averages 150-200 miles a week.  That means he can hang with the physical aspects of the job.  His help has been crucial this week to get over the hump in the vineyard and the winery, and we thank him for his help, and his wife’s patience in allowing us to use and abuse him.  Thanks, Josh, you rock!  And your golf swing is smooth when you slow it down!

Vineyard:  The vineyard is 24/29ths picked.  Someone with more sleep under their belt can break down that fraction into a simpler equation.  My winery calculator says it’s 83%.  Two producers are still waiting on their fruit, and it looks like we’ll get about a half inch of rain Tuesday and Wednesday next week as two little storms roll through.  Rain in a severe drought is never a bad thing, and the vines here get so much moisture via fog, that a bit of wetness will likely not affect them at all.  The botrytis rot has been next to non-existent this year, so I’m not too worried that we’ll see a rot problem.

The night picks have continued, and we had two in the middle of last week that commenced under clear skies and ridiculously cold temperatures.  Tuesday and Wednesday nights were 33 degrees when we started picking, and the felling in our hands only persisted for about an hour.  The problem when it’s that cold is that the hands go numb and you look like Jerry Lewis trying to pick fruit—clip, slip, cluster falls, pick it up, drop it in the bucket, make a geeky, nasal comment about how some crazy invention would help (glavin!), repeat for 6 hours.  The ground was so cold that when I knelt on it, you could feel the same icy chill working up the legs and making the knees stiff and painful.  But, hey!  On the bright side the fruit was ready for pickup at 8 am, and the fruit was so damn cold it could have kept a six pack of beer chilly for an entire weekend.  No dry ice needed.  Fortunately, the Thursday pick was under gloriously foggy skies and high 40’s.  Felt like tropical heat in comparison.

So as the fruit comes off the vines, we give them a deep drink—about 12-20 gallons per plant.  Relieved of the burden of crop, the vines takes the remaining nutrient stores and produces a root flush—the roots grow more rapidly at this stage than any other time except the Spring when the soil warms.  At that point the vines begin to go dormant and store what nitrogen is left in the form of arginine in the trunk and root system—which will magically become nitrate nitrogen again in the Spring during budbreak.  After we water the entire vineyard, after its picked out (hint, hint producers…), then we will wait for the first rain (Tues/Wed. unnamed producers!).  The first rain will saturate the topsoil, germinate all the weed seeds, and just before they break through the ground we will run them over violently with a tractor-towed cultivator.  This eliminates weed pressure and sets the stage for us to drill our cover crop seed so it doesn’t have to compete with all the weeds.  We’ll plant a bunch of annual rye and barley (I have dreams that some year I’ll make whiskey from the cover crop), vetch, bell beans, wild flowers, three kinds of clover—a veritable treasure trove of beneficial that will attract good bugs, feed the soil vital nutrients, feed our sheep and produce amazing sheep poop, and will protect our soil from the erosive effects of the predicted El Nino storm cycle.  A normal El Nino raises our rainfall from an average of 10 inches to about 16 inches, and the last serious El Nino, 1998, made the front of the vineyard a lake for a month and brought almost 30” of rain.  Common for Oregon, but it freaks us out a bit at first.  Getting the cover crop established by December will be key!  These rains should replenish the ground water that is getting low (300’ deep instead of 200’), and will wash away all the salt accumulation from using high-mineral irrigation water to replace non-existent Spring rains.  Come, skies, open up!

Winery:  The winery is alive with the smells of ferment!  We’ve finished 42 barrels of wine already, including dry rose’, barrel fermented chardonnay, chardonnay in stainless casks, and of course pinot noir.  There’s also another 11 barrels of chardonnay actively fermenting in neutral French oak casks that will need to be racked and put together to make full barrels after they’re done foaming and (perhaps even) spitting a little foam from the barrel.  The winery smells awesome right now—and of course we invite you to stop by 1273 West Laurel this Sunday to check on all our progress in 2009, and to taste some of our past (bottled) efforts. Open House!  Sunday, October 11^th, 11 am – 3 pm.  Take Highway 246 into Lompoc (becomes Ocean), then go right on ‘O’ Street, left on laurel, and go down a few blocks and look for the signs!

Otherwise, we only have a few fermenting lots of pinot noir right now: one whole cluster and one in our normal destemmed style, so the punch downs are fairly minimum.  We do expect to bring in our Sleepy Hollow Syrah in the next few weeks, so we can’t put the crusher/destemmer away quite yet.  We are right on schedule to be pressed out and barreled down by the last week of October…and then we party like it’s Hallowe’en or something…

Happy Canyon of Santa Barbara:  I am very proud to announce that I have successfully completed my second campaign to establish a local American Viticultural Area.  Many of you know that I was the main researcher/writer for the Santa Rita Hills AVA petition back in 1997-2001, and I was hired by the growers in Happy Canyon (far east side of the Santa Ynez Valley) to write, submit and spread the gospel about this very special warm-weather grape growing area.  This is where cabernet, sauvignon blanc and the other Bordelais varietals belong in Santa Barbara County.  Very unique soils and geology (chert and serpentine), and a very colorful history (called Happy Canyon because it housed the only illegal stgill in North County during prohibition).  I’m very pleased that I have added another footnote to the wine history of California, and am eager to see the region blossom with its own regional identity.  I also get a paycheck that will pay for a nice post-harvest vacation to Big Sur.  Yay, paying writing gig!

L.A. Times Article:  Some of you may know that I’ve been tapped to submit 3000 words to the LA Times Magazine for an article on the Santa Rita Hills, Clos Pepe, and a little story about Richard Sanford and myself.  The first draft, which I crafted pre-harvest over three weeks, was an amazingly egalitarian story that integrated quotes from just about every personality in the SRH.  Unfortunately, in my attempts to include everyone, I bored my editor, who asked for a more personal and narrative account t of harvest and the history of the region.  The new article is much more a personal narrative than an account of the whole region.  It’s much more entertaining, but I’m a bit worried that the other winemakers in the area will consider it more personal and Wes-focused than they had hoped.  I hope to find a new home for the first article, so they can all see I really tried to be fair-handed, but when the Times wants more Wes, who am I to deny them?

Have a great weekend, and if you’re in the area, stop by for the Open House.  Tell me you read my blog and I’ll waive the tasting fee and let you do a punchdown.  Cheers!