The Vintners Voice

The rain that was promised, and normally delivered this time of year, has not materialized.  Unless of course you count the barely perceptible drops that hardly kept the dust down.  Just as predicted with the arrival of October, things have cooled considerably.  Again the dry and cool weather are making for a very interesting harvest.  Early on it looked as if everything would be picked within days but as things have slowed (ripening that is) the blocks have began to show their fierce independence and refused to cave to peer pressure.

Sugars are trending towards higher levels but my commitment to flavors has got me hanging fruit out longer than even I had expected.  We have harvested about 20% of our fruit so far.  Only one fermentation has taken off thus far so my impressions of the harvest are still buried in the haze filling my head, the result of a 23 hour work day followed by the usual 14 hour-a-day monotony.  I suspect any day now I will wake up to either find that everything is in barrel or that it was all a dream and my fruit is still hanging on the vines.

Talk around the valley centers on high brix, botrytis, and desiccation.  Though I have seen each of these none have been extreme or beyond our ability to deal with.  I mentioned in earlier posts that this entire season has had me baffled, and though my confusion continues I am now just to the point of trusting the vineyard.   Sometimes a wine grower just has to believe that the vines themselves want to make good wine and that they should be given the chance to do so.

As a follow up to my “Vintners Dilemma” post I thought I would give everyone a Willamette Valley vintage update.

As far as crop load goes I decided to go with my gut and assume that the vintage would turn cool and potentially wet.  I thinned most of the vineyard to a single cluster per shoot.  In some blocks this is still more than 2.5 tons to the acre.

Low and behold weather has cooled and the last three days have seen showers.  Let me emphasize SHOWERS.  Not down pours, not three days of consistent rain but a typical, slow Oregon drizzle that lasts 15 minutes and are followed by wind and sun.  I have to be clear about the nature of rainfall here or all of the wine writers, which never really visit here during vintage, will misconstrue the events and hastily damn the vintage before grapes are even picked.

Nights have cooled considerably as have days and it is really the diurnal variation that makes Oregon, in general, and Patton Valley Vineyard, specifically, such an interesting place to work with.  As the temperature extremes widen from day to night, ripening slows down.  It is my belief that it is this slow ripening that produces Pinot Noir with the finest structure, complexity, concentration and intensity of fruit.

It is still to early to, at this point, make any declarations about the vintage (or else I run the risk of being like those wine writers).  However, from my point of view I would say optimism is growing with each cool and relatively dry day.

    All too often I think the Community of Wine is perceived as being, and sometimes is, stuffy and serious.  I also think that most attempts by members of the Community of Wine to be funny tend to fall a bit flat.  They tend to take the form of someone with a Southern Hemisphere accent doing something silly, spoofing news and events, geeky and esoteric references or, my favorite, a liberal dose of good old fashion European nudity.  When it comes to comedy, what I tend to find funny is people simply saying what must be said in the most direct way possible.  

    Programs such as The Simpsons and The Family Guy, among others, have demonstrated that the Cartoon can elevate simple observations and commentary, brutally clear language, to hilarious heights.  Something about animation allows it to soften a truth or at least dull its edge.  Wine related humor often lacks the tickling sarcasm that cartoons effectively deliver.  Until Now.  A friend forwarded this link to a U-tube cartoon that I think is exactly the sort of thing the wine biz needs right now; something to laugh at and an opportunity to hear something true that it might not want said.

I had a conversation yesterday with one of my winemaker friends that helped put this upcoming vintage into perspective. He had called to ask how I was balancing crop load on the vines to deal with the vintage. He specifically wanted to know what I thought about leaving, on average, less than one cluster per shoot.

This spring we had ideal weather during bloom, too ideal perhaps. It seems every flower set a berry resulting is very dense, closed clusters that are simply HUGE. If I were growing tomatoes, corn, wheat etc, I would appreciate the large crop that nature has given us. I have no problem with dropping fruit and have already done one ‘green harvest’ to reduce crop load.

Typically I would never drop below one cluster per shoot, it intuitively seems to me, that doing so brings the vine out of balance . This year however, with these enormous clusters, I am projecting unreasonably large yields even with just one cluster per shoot. I am finding myself on challenging ground intellectually; do I follow my one cluster per shoot inclination or do I respect tons per acre?

Further complicating things has been the extreme heat we have been experiencing here in the Willamette Valley. We have been through one record breaking heat spell and are now entering another. The peril this presents is this: If I carry too low of a crop and the vintage stays hot my sugars will develop faster than my flavors; the wines will be high in alcohol and potentially hollow and uninteresting. If I carry the currently heavy crop load and the weather turns cool, always a possibility here in Oregon, then I will have huge amounts of under ripe, poor quality fruit. I want my crop load to be like the bed and porridge of the baby bear, Just Right.

And “Just Right” is the tricky part. To get things Just Right I have to be able to see into the crystal ball and know what the weather is going to do a month from now. Really now, if I could do that I wouldn’t be here doing this! To be honest, like my friend, I don’t know what to do. All I can do is guess and hedge my bets and try to balance the extremes of risk. Despite what most people think about winemaking and winegrowing; there are rarely clear answers as to how to proceed. There is no class at Davis, no website or book or consultant that can tell you what the right thing to do is. When it comes down to it, more so in extremely hot or cool years , all a vintner has is that feeling in their gut. In my opinion the Best are those that follow it.

I have often asserted that the most exhilarating aspect of wine is texture. It is texture that separates good wine from great. Our vocabulary for describing texture is, compared to that of flavor and aroma, rudimentary at best. Though there are a variety of textural qualities I find attractive in wine, the one I most ascribe to greatness is Detailed. No other attribute indicates the greatness of season, site or producer than a wine that seems to be etched of something solid and either polished to a fine sheen or wrapped in a plush jacket of velvet, silk or lace. If a wine is to be classy, it must be Detailed.

As a winemaker I have never considered myself an artist but a craftsman. The distinction for me is that my approach to winemaking is one of bringing out the beauty in my materials, the grape. Think of a furniture maker that is simply presenting a piece of wood in a way that best expresses its inherent beauty. Think of a mason working with stone to build a wall that best presents the nature of the stone. I see art as something more deliberate, something with a more clearly defined end point, something with a higher degree of intent. In the above examples an artist would build furniture more about the building and less about the wood, the wall more about design and technique and less about the stone itself. I’ve just never sought to so exactly determine the nature of my final product that I would consider it art; it isn’t about me it’s about my material.

As I begin blending my 2008 Lorna-Marie and block designated wines I am taken by the degree of Detail the wines show. The wines have very clearly defined borders, prominent but rounded corners and transition smoothly and efficiently between them. The surfaces range from velour and silk to polished glass and metal. The wines are well structured frames wrapped with elegant and exquisite fabrics. Think of them as the muscular arm of a woman not covered by the black dress.

This is allowing me, to an extent I have never before experienced, to more precisely shape a wine in the physical sense; its structure and texture. I feel that by carefully selecting the ‘pieces’ (specific barrels of wine) I can deliberately build the wine. I liken it to sculpture.

However I still cannot claim I am an artist. Each barrel is a very specific expression of Patton Valley Vineyard. They are all indicative of place but each tells there own version of the story. Though I may deliberately and with intent blend a wine, it is still more about the material than it is about me. Even though I am able to control, to a greater degree than ever before, the shape of the final product they are still just the presentation that I believe best shows off Patton Valley Vineyard. Though proud, I am still just a craftsman. I will leave the Art to the Artists.