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| Hillside Vineyard Looking Down |
2004 Crush Report
One thing I have learned in my brief career as a vintner is that farming is not for the faint of heart. The only thing you can be sure of is that each year will bring many surprises. The first challenge takes place at the end of April and lasts till June. This is when bud break happens. Each bud represents about four bunches of grapes. Everything happens very fast, bud break, leafing out and bloom. The vine is very vulnerable, especially to frost.
We start watching the weather very carefully and if a freeze is predicted especially what we call a hard freeze, when the temperature drops into the 20’s, frost prevention procedures are necessary. Some vineyards have wind machines which circulate the air and cause the cooler air to rise and be replaced by the warmer air above. These machines consist of huge diesel engines, driving a propeller about the size used on a DC – 7. Our neighbor, Mike Grgich, put in three wind machines and I’ll never forget the first night they went on. We didn’t know what was happening. We woke up to this sound that was very similar to flight #943 landing on your roof. You never really get used to it since they automatically go on when the temperature drops, usually about three in the morning.
Other vineyards use misters, which spray a fine mist over the entire vine, encasing it in a layer of ice, which insulates it from the cold. This sounds weird but it’s the best way to fight frost. We use a third method on our Lakeview and Jake’s Creek Vineyards. We spray a chemical called frost shield which covers the vine with a plastic like coating. It works great but the only draw back is the rain can wash it off. It lasts about two weeks and is very labor intensive. We don’t have to be concerned about Treva’s Vineyard because hillside vineyards rarely ever get frost.
It is now late May and we have survived the frost. Now we are faced with another menace, this one with four legs. Jake and I have a morning ritual, to walk down the hill past the pond to the gate and get the morning paper. We go past the Lakeview Vineyard and the petit verdot along the road. I noticed as we were going by, that we have a number of blooms missing, neatly clipped off as if someone was using a pruning shear. The worst of all scenarios has happened. We have a deer inside our fence at bloom.
The deer come out at night and graze. They will walk along the vines and clip each bloom as they go. The problem is our deer fence now keeps the deer inside the property instead of outside. We have been building on the property and the deer must have followed the construction workers when the gate was open. The problem is that we have 48 acres and are heavily wooded with a lot of places to hide. This is where we depend on Jake and that wonderful black lab nose. We kept finding the deer and chasing it, only to lose it again. If you scare it enough times, it will jump the seven foot deer fence and get out. This is what must have happened because it was finally gone after about two weeks. We lost about half of our petit verdot and some cabernet in our Lakeview Vineyards and Jake’s Creek Vineyards.
2004 our third vintage was under way. June was a cool month but that was not going to last. July brought hot summer days and beautiful warm evenings. Northern California wine country has fabulous weather. Calistoga’s summer can last from June to November with temperatures ranging from 75- 100 degrees during the day with warm nights in the 70’s and 80’s until about midnight, then cooling down into the low 60’s with very low humidity. Often the fog will sneak in from the Sonoma Coast and we will drop into the 50’s at night until the fog burns off in the morning. The grapes love the hot days and cool nights and 2004 was shaping up to be a great year.
I said farming is not for the faint of heart and I meant it. August brought very hot days into the hundreds and the grapes started verasion very early. Verasion is when the red wine grapes get their color, first a few berries and then the whole cluster becoming a beautiful dark purple. The sugars start forming in the grapes.
This is a very busy time in the vineyard. We start thinning the leaf canopy to expose the grapes to the sun, but hoping to leave enough to protect the bunches. This is also the time that we start dropping the fruit that has not matured evenly or if there are just too many bunches per cane. The problem with dropping fruit is once you take it off you can’t put it back.
In 2004 we could not foresee what was to come. When you’re making a premium cabernet, you now turn over the vineyard to the winemaker. Once September arrives, Mark Herold becomes a frequent visitor. What he is looking for is what fruit should be removed and what flavors are developing. We continued to have very hot weather in September and the sugars were rising quickly.
The sugar measurement is called brix and is measured with a spectrometer. If the sugars get into the 26-28 range, many people will harvest, but in very hot years the sugars can be high but the seeds still green. This means you have to vigorously water the vines to dilute the sugars and wait for maturation. In 2004, we watered and watered but the grapes started to shrivel and dehydrate under the intense sun, especially on the sunny side with the most exposure.
With Mark there’s no compromise. What we have to have is hang time and sugar, ph and acidity must be right. We harvested Treva’s Vineyard on September 23 and the fruit was beautiful. We got a very light crop due to all the dehydration, but wonderful intense flavors and balance.
Two weeks later we harvested our Lakeview Vineyard. Our poor petit verdot had survived the deer and heat. What was left was fabulous and would be addsed to Treva’s Vineyard wine. Once again, it was a very light yield but wonderful fruit with great flavors.
Jake’s Creek we call our Bordeaux vineyard because it is always the latest and the terroir yields fruit very reminiscent of areas of Bordeaux. Late heat in October finally finished maturing Jakes with minimal dehydration and again wonderful flavors. We had finished our harvest on October 28 and a celebration was really in order.
Harvest is a wonderful time and is the culmination of all your year’s hard work. Our vineyard workers head to their villages in Mexico to celebrate Christmas and our vineyards turn a beautiful yellow in anticipation of a long dormant winter. Our grapes will soon be filling beautiful new French oak barrels to spend 20 months becoming our wonderful wines.