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Wes Hagen's Blog
Description:
Wes Hagen received his viticultural and winemaking training from the University of California at Davis extension program. He is the Vineyard Manager and Winemaker for Clos Pepe Vineyards in Santa Barbara County, California, where he grows Chardonnay and Pinot Noir for a variety of wineries including his own. Wes’ Pinot Noir was recently ranked as one of the top 30 Pinots in California by Wine Spectator. Wes also covers the world of backyard vineyards for WineMaker magazine writing our “Backyard Vines” column every issue since 2000. He kicked off his “Backyard Vines” blog for winemakermag.com in September 2008 featuring his insights on growing great grapes and making great wine from homegrown grapes.

Jun 24
2009

Year In the Vineyard #13 (6.25.09) with Wes Hagen, Clos Pepe

Posted by Wes Hagen in Untagged 

In which Wes and Chanda are off to San Francisco to work the market, speak to the faithful at Pinot Days, east and drink like Vikings, and explain some of the geology of the Santa Rita Hills area of Santa Barbara County, California.

 

Year in the Vineyard, Week #13
June 20-25, 2009
By Wes Hagen, VM/WM Clos Pepe

Twitter: weshagen (in haikus),  Facebook: Wes Hagen

 Poppies


Summer officially arrived on Father's

Jun 18
2009

Year In the Vineyard #12 (6.18.09) with Wes Hagen, Clos Pepe

Posted by Wes Hagen in Untagged 

Year in the Vineyard, Week #12: June 6-12, in which Wes and Chanda move the entire winery and blogs poetically about everything from pyrazines to Twitter!

Year in the Vineyard, Week #12
With Wes Hagen, Vineyard Manager and Winemaker for Clos Pepe Vineyards and Estate Wines.

Week 12 vines

It's going to be a short blog this week. I've barely finished the winery move (about 10 minutes ago), and I'm quite wiped.

Jun 11
2009

Year In the Vineyard #11 with Wes Hagen, Clos Pepe

Posted by Wes Hagen in Untagged 

In which Wes discusses the week's cultural practices, unloads some barrels,discusses vegetative vs. fruit ripening in the vineyard, and eats and drinks very well.

Looking west week 12

Year in the Vineyard Blog with Wes Hagen
Week #11, June 6-11, 2009

Caps, Skins and a Kiss of Botrytis

Bucking Barrels

Root 246 and a Bitchin' Rose'

Vineyard status: The vineyard continues to advance through the season with relative ease.

Jun 05
2009

Year In the Vineyard #10 with Wes Hagen, Clos Pepe

Posted by Wes Hagen in Untagged 

Wherein Wes and Chanda continue their ‘on tour' status, traveling to Disneyland and Woodland Hills to teach Southern Californians all about pinot noir and Clos Pepe.  Also included: info about canopy management.

 wes teaches at disneyland

Year in the Vineyard #10
May 30-June 5, 2009
By Wes Hagen, Vineyard Manager and Winemaker, Clos Pepe
 

It feels like I haven't been home in weeks, even though I've had a day or two to sleep

May 28
2009

Year in the Vineyard #10: Judge Not, Lest Ye Be Judged

Posted by Wes Hagen in Untagged 

Year in the Vineyard Blog, Week #10, wherein Wes travels to the LA International Wine Competition in Pomona, CA, and discusses wine evaluation and whether it is necessary in the Web 2.0 world. I plan to run a second part of this blog with pictures, hopefully tomorrow. It's a bit stream-of-consciousness this week, as is appropriate coming from a cranium soaking in 229 wines from the last 48

May 21
2009

Year In the Vineyard #9 with Wes Hagen, Clos Pepe

Posted by Wes Hagen in Untagged 

Wherein Wes and Chanda take a trip to Napa Valley to speak at the WineMaker Conference, plus a whole new week of vineyard stories, practices and fun wine facts.

 

 Year in the Vineyard Week #9: May 15-21, 2009

No Time to Nap in Napa

Feeling Fine on Route 29

Weekly Vineyard Meetings

Vineyard and Winery Updates

wes in napa

Off to Napa:  The 2nd Annual WineMaker Magazine Conference was held last weekend at the Napa

May 13
2009

Year in the Vineyard #8.1 with Wes Hagen, VM/WM Clos Pepe

Posted by Wes Hagen in Untagged 

 

Wherein Wes describes another fabulous week at Clos Pepe Vineyards and Estate wines, including sheep shearing, focusing on balance in the vines, ordering bottling supplies, getting ready for flowering and losing gracefully at Bocce!

 vineyard week 8

 Year in the Vineyard #8 by Wes Hagen

May 9-15, 2009

Hairy Shearer, You Don't Drink Me Flowers, The Bottles are Ordered and the Liquor is Clean, Why Ya Gotta Bust My

May 07
2009

Year in the Vineyard #7 with Wes Hagen, VM/WM Clos Pepe

Posted by Wes Hagen in Untagged 

Year in the Vineyard, Week 7 covers vineyard shoot thinning, irrigation considerations, wine hospitality and a hiking trip up Gaviota Peak to peek at the Santa Barbara Fire.

Week #7: Year in the Vineyard

Fruit week 7

The Skinny on Shoot Thinning, Water Water Everywhere So Give the Vines a Drink, Wes Goes on Tour Without Leaving Home, I Can See Clearly Now the Smoke Blows West.

Week 7 of the growing season has

Apr 30
2009

Year in the Vineyard, Week #6 with Wes Hagen/Clos Pepe

Posted by Wes Hagen in Untagged 

April 24-April 30, 2009

 Week 6 shoots

To Top it All Off:
 
Filling the Gaps, Washing the Bungs,

a Sip of Water, Say it and Spray It,

Jack Frost Sipping at Your Rose'?


It's week six of ‘Year in the Vineyard', and the vineyard is growing and thriving. The weather turned cold again, the vines are having a hard time exchanging potassium from the cold soil, so the vines have turned back to a slightly creamy

Apr 23
2009

Year in the Vineyard, Week #5 with Wes Hagen/Clos Pepe

Posted by Wes Hagen in wes hagenviticultureviniculturepinot noirclos pepebackyard vines

A Year in the Vineyard with Wes Hagen, Clos Pepe

Week #5: April 17-April 23rd

We're Having a Heatwave!

Crew Meetings and Work Checking

Mildew Pressure

Sustainability in Practice

shoot 4.23.09

Is it Week Five already? Can I turn off the frost alarm yet? (No!)


This week we're going on a walk through the vineyard to see what's happening now that we have some real growth. How did the heat wave affect the vineyard? What are we doing out there this week? Why is mildew such a threat in the Santa Rita Hills? What the hell does it mean to be sustainable, organic or biodynamic?


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

sunset 4.18.09


From the frost pan and into the fire: The vintage is being punctuated by extremes thus far-but the timing has been excellent. In a perfect world we would have a cool but sunny Spring, a warm Summer and a warm Fall for harvest (with cold, foggy mornings for picking). The Santa Rita Hills are a miracle of odd geology, and even though we are one of the most consistently cool appellations in California, we do get our heat spikes. Properly timed, the heat can be a blessing. We've been so cold in March and April that last week's four days in the low 90's really warmed up the soil and got the vineyard fully chugging. The fog and wind have returned and we're seeing highs in the 60's and 70's presently.  Why does it matter: Most shoots showed twice the growth in those four days of heat as the previous three weeks of budbreak. It is not uncommon to see a few inches of growth per day on young shoots during hot weather. The vines stay rather milky yellow-green while its still cool, but once the soil warms and potassium becomes exchangeable, the vines get a burst of Kermit-green coloration-and we're seeing that after the heat. Maximum efficiency for a grapevines occurs in full sunlight at 87 degrees Fahrenheit. Mildew is destroyed after a few hours over 95 degrees. So the early heat did two good things for us: it initiated a rapid period of vegetative growth and ‘reset' the mildew pressure in the vineyard-likely frying those evil little spores into oblivion. Frost has been far from my mind during the heat wave-night time lows have been in the 50's and I've been sleeping like a drunk baby. We will be back into the 30's by the weekend, and likely we'll have at least a few more night where I'll fire up the wind machines and the sprinklers. So far so good!

 rows of pommard on 4.23.09

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

• The Crew: the Beating Heart of Any Vineyard. Every Monday at 7am I try to meet with the crew and discuss the upcoming week, the work to get done, the theories behind the work, and to discuss what we accomplished the previous week. Each day before lunch I also like to get on the golf cart and drive to where the work is occurring and check in on progress. In agriculture there are two basic managerial philosophies: hourly work and by-the-piece (or contract) work. If you pay by what they accomplish the work tends to be very hurried-if you're picking broccoli this may be a wise way to go, but with winegrape farming we pay by the hour to make sure each vine gets all the time it needs to be pruned, preened, watered, fertilized, groomed, netted and picked. We offer our full time workers paid medical benefits for them and their families-rare in ag work, but it helps us keep the same crew for years-fine tuning cultural practice instead of retraining a crew each year. Why does it matter: As I have said, if we were growing Cab it wouldn't matter as much, but THIS is pinot noir-it shows every detail of management and site, and as a result we work very hard to give the vines every opportunity to thrive and produce quality. Pinot Noir is high maintenance-and it remembers everything done to it. It's like the Princess in the Princess and the Pea. You can lay her down anywhere you wish, but if she's at all uncomfortable you're going to know rather quickly.

powdery leaf from google


• Mildew-the downside of being so cool. The Santa Rita Hills is one of the coolest viticultural areas in the United States. That translates into ridiculously long hang-times for our fruit (like Kobe Bryant dunking on the moon), cool picking days, ocean breezes, fog in the morning, and three houses that don't even have air conditioning. Highs all year around are between 58-75, with a few days getting colder and a few Santa Ana wind conditions warming us up. Mildew thrives in warm, moist conditions. When temperatures range between 65 and 85 degrees there's no doubt that mildew is growing on leaves and clusters-which is most days here in the SRH. The clusters are protected by tiny coverings until flowering, but the leaves and shoots are delicate and succulent in their youth, perfect food for hungry mildew-and allowing a mildew infection to become visible in the vineyard shows an embarrassing lack of attention. So beginning this week we will spray the vineyard with a mix of liquid sulfur and copper. Why does it matter: The fumes from the sulfur (registered organic product) will keep the mildew from sporulating, and the copper will continue to offer us a few degrees of protection from frost as well as retarding the growth of botrytis shoot blight. (The same ‘noble rot' that makes dessert wines also can decimate a vineyard if not controlled). The sulfur mix should keep the vineyard safe for a week and a half when we have to re-apply, and I mix up the sprays so we don't apply the same materials more than a few times per season to keep the mildew from developing a resistance to any single material.

 ccvt logo


Sustainability in Practice: It goes way beyond dirt. Clos Pepe Vineyards is in the process of filling out the 97 page document to establish itself as a SIP (Sustainability in Practice) certification through the Central Coast Vineyard Team. Clos Pepe has been a member of the CCVT since 1999. The Team has been a champion of sustainable viticulture since the 1990's, providing worksheets to rate one's own vineyard for green practices which keeps vineyard managers thinking about improving their farming. Recently they have offered an alternative to becoming Certified Organic: the SIP certificate. Why does it matter: The system is more descriptive than prescriptive. It also allows a wide variety of farming methodology-you get credit for sustainable practices and lose credit for conventional sprays and farming. The vineyard is rated as a system instead of following a system of prohibitions. The participation form will likely take weeks, and will be another tool to help me evaluate everything we do here at the Clos.

 foggy day 4.23.09

Weekly Vineyard Vocab Review:

It's Not Easy Being (or Understanding) Green!
Or... What Did You Expect When Hippies Are in Charge?

Here's my personal definition of the different philosophies surrounding grape growing:

 Conventional: Conventional farming is a results-based philosophy of agriculture that uses mechanization and technology to improve yields, quality, transport and salability of produce.  Traditionally a monoculture--only one crop grown at a time, and fertilized chemically.  Conventional farming methods came into common use after World WarII.

(lower case ‘s') sustainable: A term that is bandied about, mostly by PR/marketing types to convince customers that their farming has a ‘green' focus. There are no firm rules or protocol for those who like to call their farming ‘sustainable'. Use these questions to check up on these folks: Do you have a restricted use pesticide permit? Do you use herbicide? Lower case ‘s' sustainable used to mean something-but in the current green mania, I have yet to meet a winegrower recently that hasn't called their production sustainable. To be fair, compared to common agribusiness, most vineyards are low-impact and intrinsically sustainable (opposed to say, conventional strawberry farming).

(upper case ‘S') Sustainable: I often call this type of farming ‘UC Santa Cruz Sustainable', from what I learned about sustainability from my interns from UCSC-Ariel and Angela Lavie. (Go Banana Slugs!) Bona fide Sustainability means that nothing leaves or is delivered to the vineyard. If you spray sulfur, you have a sulfur mine. Water comes from an on-site well and is used so the aquifer is protected and not depleted. If you use fertilizer, it comes from the animals that live on the property. This type of sustainable production could be considered far beyond organic or certified organic from a green philosophy standpoint.

Organic: No synthesized fertilizers or synthesized sprays are used on the vineyard. All materials used in the vineyard are natural (derived only from animal or vegetable sources). While it's easy to say you farm organically, most folks that actually do go through the certification process detailed below.

sheep and mom, 4.23.09

Certified Organic: Same as above, but the farm has gone through a certification process to prove there are no synthetic residues in the soil (such as CCOF in California). Most certification organizations require three years of organic farming to occur before the certification process begins. Even though the certifiers are commonly highly efficient and professional-I suspect it would be very easy for a farm to break the rules and still keep their certification.

steiner

Biodynamic: Based on the writings and philosophy of Rudolph Steiner (1861-1925, this ‘system' is based on a series of lectures given at the end of his life to European farmers to offer them an alternative to the new chemical fertilizers being sold. Steiner believed in a philosophy very closely related to ‘monism': that everything in the world was simultaneously spiritual and material in nature. ‘Biologically dynamic' was a term first coined by Steiner's students, not Steiner himself, which was later shortened to ‘biodynamic'. Biodynamic farming considers the entire farm as an ‘organism', and much like Sustainable Farming, the farm is supposed to produce all fertilizer and materials for the farm from within. Special preparations of botanicals are added to compost piles, cow horns were buried, and cultural practices, planting and fertilization were timed with position of the planets and the moon. My feelings on Steiner are stronger than my feelings on biodynamic farming. Steiner was clearly a brilliant man with his philosophies ping-ponging between transcendentalism, Goethe, natural medicine and his own brand of humanist Christianity. For what people knew in his time, his theories are brilliant, and I would have loved to see what he would have done with a thoroughly modern education. In my estimation, biodynamics can do no harm, and are used both by true believers and those that use the system as a marketing niche. Does cow horn compost and biodynamic compost improve the health of a vineyard? I bet it does, but not in a way that is normally recognized by agribusiness. Its detractors call it voodoo and its adherents call it ‘magic for the vineyard'. The truth, as so often happens, is in the grey area in the middle. It's a lovely way to feed the soil and the vines, and there are those that have used biodynamics to make their vineyard mildew and rot free without fungicide sprays. Modern biodynamics have taken Steiner's theories and expanding upon them-he never did any research to confirm any of his ideas or theories, and the system is certainly more philosophical and astrological than scientific. It's hard to say whether it makes better wines-I suggest it may be more for the comfort of the customers and the marketing department than the quality of the wine. I may change my mind when I see some peer reviewed evidence that shows the actual effect of biodynamics on the nutrient status, health and natural defenses of the grapevine. But who's going to foot the bill for that study? The pesticide companies?

shoot tip 4.23.09

Where is Clos Pepe on this issue?  I like to call my farming style 'common sense farming'.  I draw on aspects of organic, (s)Sustainable, Biodynamic and conventional farming.  Instead of fixing myself to one 'camp' (and there are certainly those who have chosen sides), I use whatever tools from the above methods that I believe will best support the production of world class pinot noir and chardonnay. Biodynamic compost?  You bet!  Organic weed control?  Better for the soil!  A modern tractor and a few wonderfully low-impact (but synthesized) sprays!  Absoultely!  Science and technology rocks and I would be an idiot to ignore it. We won the 2007 Green Award from the Santa Barbara Green Consortium--the only one that year for vineyards in the SBC.

One wine I loved this week:

(a new feature for the Blog, and one I hope to continue...)

Local wines that offer great value, from $10 to $50.

cambria label

Cambria 2006 Chardonnay ‘Katherine's Vineyard' Santa Maria Valley ($15-$20) Nose shows pretty aromas of hazelnut and oak with hints of apple, pear and a maritime minerality that hints of a fresh cracked oyster. In the mouth the wine performs similarly to a nice Villages-level White Burgundy with a Californian edge....clean, well-oaked with classy acidity, good depth and length benefitting from firm structure in the acid department. Fine balance between attack, mid-palate and finish. Although it's not the greatest Chardonnay I've ever tasted, I can find no fault if you like this style. And for the money (beep...beep...beep...) back up the damn truck. Put it blind into a white Burg tasting and watch folks stumble over their notes when this is revealed to be a sub-$20 Santa Barbara Chard.  Match with a (pink-on-the-bone and crispy skin) roast chicken, fingerling potatoes with a warm spinach salad with lardons and Meyer lemon juice and olive oil.

 







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