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
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:
• 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!
• 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.
• 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.
• 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.
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.
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.
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?
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 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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