Making up ground at Stanton Vineyard

As I sit looking at a 70 degree late- August day, I have to think "Well, we could have hurricane-force winds" and wish my cohorts in Virginia and New York's Long Island the best.  Late October harvest dates in Oregon are definitely better than grapes blown all over the ground in August.

That said, with last week's even, perfectly mid-80s temperatures, we've finally caught back up to 2010.  Sort of.  We're on the 2010 pace from the standpoint of physiological progression - seeds are all hardened up, shoot tip growth has almost stopped, and the start of veraison is likely days, not weeks, away. The vines are switching over from growing more leaves to ripening the fruit.  From an overall heat unit standpoint, though, we're still behind 2010, and we're still on track for the coolest overall vintage in decades. 

It's never boring making Pinot Noir here.  I can't imagine anywhere else in the U.S. where we can get completely different seasons every year and still produce wines with fantastic depth and complexity.  We are so lucky, we can even go out foraging for Morels while we wait for the Pinot Noir to mature.

STANTON VINEYARD

I spent some time recently in down in the Lorane Valley (SE of Eugene) at Stanton Vineyard.  Charlie Stanton's fruit is truly beautiful and unique.  The vineyard sits up on top of a little knoll with fantastic clear views from SE all the way to the Coast Range (read "All day sunshine").  The soils are rocky with sandstone subsoils - truly different than all our other Pinot Noir sites.

Here are some pictures of the vineyard right after the final hedging of the year:

Note how nice and moderately sized the clusters are?  The higher elevation pushed bloom date at this site into a bit of sketchier weather, which led to a poorer set than other places where we're dropping literally 1/2 of the fruit on the ground.  What does the lighter set mean?  To some extent, it just means there's less thinning to do at Stanton than elsewhere. As an added bonus, the clusters are a little looser, reducing disease pressure later in the season.

For a last inspiring, sunny photo, here's a shot looking West from the top of the Stanton Vineyard.  Smaller vines in the foreground are new plantings that'll start bearing a crop in 2012
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Time for green harvest 2011

Well, we now know that we had an absolutely perfect bloom and fantastic fruit set this year.  Most of our Pinot Noir is sitting at 5.5-6.5 tons per acre, an amazingly perfect conversion of flowers into grapes.  Unfortunately, we couldn't hope to ripen that much fruit in the best of years (especially when we're defining ripeness by flavor). Even our brothers and sisters to the South can't do that.  So, what do we do?  We go through every vineyard and cut tons of fruit off the vines.   This is all hand-harvesting of clusters, so it's slow and expensive...and it makes a farmer cry when all that fruit lands in the dirt.

But this is the price we pay for wanting to harvest before the late fall rains come.  Right now, we're anticipating picking the FIRST of our Pinot Noir sometime around Oct 25th.  That's about 1 month later than normal and easily 2 weeks past my comfort zone.  Late Oct harvests can produce spectacular vintages (e.g., 2008), but I cannot remember too many Halloweens when we hadn't seen substantial rainfall. And that's what we're talking about this year - Picking between Oct 25 and Nov 1!!  Hang on to your hats, folks. 

Don't get me wrong, this is the type of year I love - It's full of challenge, and it rewards those who make the tough decisions and who decide to put in extra effort to coax delicate Pinot Noir clusters to ripeness.  We're all talking to each other and nervously commenting "This vintage will be made in October", but we're all farmers.  We'd show an unimaginable degree of hubris if we weren't worried about something.  Five years from now, we'll hopefully all look back with much more machismo on how we stood up to the coldest vintage in Oregon since 1976....

In the mean time, check out photos of the vineyards below.  The upside of the cool, even weather is canopies that are dark emerald green and operating at maximum photosynthetic capacity.  We could end up being surprised - All it'll take is a few above-average weeks in Sep, and we'll pull in harvest by a week...which is all we really need.

Shea Vineyard snapshot:

Perfect weather during flowering led to a perfect fruit set.  All the clusters are big, tight, and heavy.

Estimates this week were that we had ~ 5.5 tons per acre, even after our 25% crop reduction earlier in the month.  We're moving forward with a 40% reduction in clusters this week!  Even in a warmer year, we can truly ripen maybe 2.75 tons per acre from Shea (physiologically & phenolically).  If we leave the 5.5 tpa on the vines now, we'll end up with a lot of fruit, but it won't lead to complex interesting wines.  So, even though we're paying by the acre, on the ground it goes.

Walnut Hill snapshot:

The vineyard we're leasing on Walnut Hill is managed by Stiring Fox and his crew at Stirling Wine Grapes.  At this site, the set wasn't quite as perfect (see variation in berry size below), but there's still plenty of fruit.

Here, we're taking a bit more of a manicure approach to thinning.  We'll be reducing the number of clusters on the very heavy-set vines mostly by cleaning up "crowded" areas where clusters are bound together or overlapping and by eliminating all of the wings.  Again here, we'll come back in 2-3 weeks and drop the clusters that are lagging as we hit veraison and things color up.