The Vintners Voice

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.