notes from the winemaker

Early this week we had our first temperatures of the year in the 90s — three days in a row. Yesterday I went out to check on the young vine Pinot, to see how the vines were dealing with the heat and how the crew had performed with training them. Minimal signs of water stress, though we have yet to irrigate. Most of the vines are up the stake and tied, and some are ready to be topped.

This year I noted the start of bloom in the vineyard early in June. Since then we have had the best possible weather: no rain, moderate temperatures and no extreme winds. We were in full bloom when I checked in the middle of June. Yesterday I could not find any fresh flowering except on a few late shoots. The crop is set, giving me my first chance to make a yield plan for the year. From what I can see there won’t be a lot of green thinning to do this year. It looks like the cluster counts and sizes are on the light side of average. The Syrah is ahead of the other varieties at this time. The berries are mostly under 5mm — not quite pea-sized yet. This picture is Syrah clone 174. These clusters are short for our Syrah — the other clones at the vineyard have thrown clusters about 20% longer. The Grenache is about as far along as the Syrah, as the shot above shows. The following picture is from a vine that was frost-damaged back in May. The clusters are stunted and carry just a few berries. For these vines — well, there’s always next year.
The Pinot clone 115 shown above is typical for our mature cordon-trained vines. The clusters are small. The berry sizing is behind that of the Syrah and Grenache, but then the berries are going to end up smaller at harvest as well. I expect this harvest to be late and compressed, but the Pinot will come in first as usual. I’m not showing the pics of clones 667 and 943, but the 667 clusters are a little bigger than the 115 and slightly more numerous while the 943 are smaller, more numerous and developing irregularly (the latter two probably related to the vines’ youth and cane pruning). I’m not showing the Tannat or the Counoise either, but they are essentially as developed as the Mourvedre shown above. The Tannat clusters are less even, with a broader range of berry sizes. The clusters of the Counoise were not as obviously as affected by the frost as the Grenache was. Finally, the Syrah canopy is always the first to get leggy and require trimming — the image above shows the “before” picture. This vintage is going to be all about taming the canopy and bringing the leaf area into balance with the lighter crop load. A lot of this will be manual labor, but this year we will also be restricting irrigation of the mature vines to a greater degree than we have in the vintages to date.