Anne Amie Vineyards, Carlton Oregon

Make Up Your Mind

It's a rainy day.

No, it's a sunny day.

Wait, it's a foggy day.

Hey, now it's a sunny day.

No, it's a rainy day.

All of these days happened on my short commute to the winery over Chehalem Mountain this morning. The weather has become schizophrenic. Let's just say the weather is not great for grapes.

Oregon Vineyard Services (OVS) is recommending spraying for botrytis and predicting five or six more days of this moody weather. However, if the sun comes out after that all this will be quickly forgotten. We expect to start harvesting pinot noir in about ten days.

(pictured above: this morning's weather)

Blowing In the Wind

We certainly got more rain than we wanted over the weekend, but this afternoon the sun came out and, best of all, a stiff dry wind has been drying off the grape bunches for hours. Hopefully this will be enough to forestall development of botrytis. While botrytis is famous for making great sweet wines, it is not famous for making great pinot noir. Called "noble rot" when this fungus attacks and makes sweet wines, it is known as "gray rot" when it destroys healthy grapes destined for dry wines like our pinot noir. There are various sprays used to combat this gray rot threat, but their effectiveness is not reliable. The best solution is to keep that nice dry wind blowing and the sun shining.

Rain, Rain Go Away

Let's just say so far it has caused a lot of worry and a few sleepless nights, but the last two days of showers seems to have caused few problems. Pictured above you see the showers crossing the coast range heading towards our vineyards at 3:30 this afternoon. Yet after a couple of days of scattered showers nothing serious has hit yet and my boots are covered with dust, not mud after a walk through our Lafayette pinot noir vineyard. A little water is probably good at this point as after months of drought and heat some of the grapes were a little dehydrated and a little drink won't hurt. But enough-is-enough and we are hoping for the dry breezes and moderate temperatures the forecasts are calling for, but you can be assured we well all get a lot more rest after these rain clouds disappear.

...damn, there's another shower.

Losing Weight

This year seems to be on the way to providing not only good quality grapes, but a good quantity of them also. After two years (04 and 05) with low yields because of bad flowering periods (and a host of other issues) we had an excellent crop set last spring and the vines, after two years with little fruit to ripen, went into high gear after their long rest. In fact, they gave us too much of a good thing, which means we have to drop fruit to be sure that each remaining bunch gets the vines full attention instead of spreading its energy over too big of a crop. Our goal is a maximum concentration of complexity and vineyard character in our wines and too large of a crop dilutes those characteristics. That means that our vineyards are littered with bunches of grapes we have cut from the vines to be sure the vine has enough energy to perfectly ripen each remaining grape. Pictured above: a bunch of pinot noir on the rock-hard dry-farmed Willakenzie soil of our estate Lafayette that made the ultimate sacrifice for its brothers.

King Harvest is Surely Coming

We are a superstitious bunch out here in wine country when it comes to talking about a vintage before it's actually harvested so as not to jinx anything. At this point we will only say so-far-so-good and there is a lot of optimism here in the Willamette Valley. For the first time in two years there is the potential for a good sized crop and there also looks to be good potential for quality. We have now settled into beautiful, warm fall weather and now it is only a race to get the grapes fully ripe before the rainy season hits. Pictured here are some gorgeous bunches of pinot noir from our estate Lafayette Vineyard.

Wish us luck.

Sunburn

Though now we have returned to a more classic cool Oregon climate, two weekends ago the temperatures went off the charts hitting 105 degrees. While grapes love sun, they don't like too much and, in fact, sunburn just like we do when we stay on the beach too long. While we would put on sun block, the only thing that protects the grapes from sunburn are the leaves. We have to remove leaves during the growing season as we want the vine to concentrate on ripening grapes, not growing leaves. However, you have to remove them in just the right way, leaving the leaves on the afternoon side thick to shade the grapes from the hot afternoon sun. If you do this correctly, you greatly reduce the chance of sunburned grapes and all of our own vineyards escaped any significant damage.

However, because of the vigorous leaf growth this vintage has brought, not all of the vineyards we work with were able to complete work in some sections of their vineyards before the heat spell hit. Pictured here are two sunburned bunches from Hawks View Vineyard. All bunches like these will have to be removed. Fortunately only a small section of Hawks View was damaged and, as we had good fruit set in the spring, there will be plenty of good bunches left to harvest in the fall.

We've Got Bugs

The vineyards are now lush and green after several weeks of bright sunshine - well, part of the vineyards are green. In front of the winery you can see that dark hole in the vineyard developing again. That ever growing circle of brown among the green, that circle showing the progress of the phylloxera as they slowly, but surely kill our vines.

Fortunately it will not destroy all of our vineyards as all of our recent plantings are immune because they are planted on grafted rootstock. Only our historic vineyard, planted by Fred and Mary Benoit almost 30 years ago, will die. Visitors this spring can see the wide swath ripped out of our Riesling vineyard, which is being replanted over the next three years.

Phylloxera, native to America's east coast, is a root feeding aphid, which destroys the roots of the vines, killing them over a few years. However, they don't kill all vines, just the European Vitis Vinifera, which are responsible for most of the world's wines and all of its great ones. Indigenous American vines are immune to this root louse having adapted to it over the millenniums. In the late 1800's, phylloxera was transported to Europe on botanical samples of American vines and promptly set about almost completely devastating the vineyards of Europe. Nothing was discovered to destroy phylloxera, but scientists finally came to the solution of grafting Vinifera vines onto resistant American vine root stock. Even today this is the only solution and most of the world's wine grapes are grown on Vinifera vines grafted on American rootstock.

When Oregon's wine pioneers started planting vineyards here they did not believe that phylloxera would be problem and took a calculated risk by planting their Vinifera vines like Pinot Noir on their own roots instead of grafted rootstock. It was a bet they lost and over the next decades all of Oregon's oldest vineyards will have to be replanted as the phylloxera root louse makes its way across the state.

No Frost Damage!

Although it dropped to around 32 degrees last night, it looks like we escaped any significant frost damage. Fortunately our pinot and riesling vineyards are all on hillsides and the cold air will just flow down them gathering in low lying areas and causing frost damage there. Today was much warmer and it looks like the danger has passed until fall.

Fear of Frost

The weather forecast for tonight predicts temperatures dropping into the mid-thirties. Frost now could do considerable damage to the young leaves. We do not need another low quantity vintage so we are hoping to get through what looks like the last night we will be threatened by frost until the fall. We'll let you know what happens tomorrow...

The 2006 Vintage is Off and Running

 

The days have been warm and sunny for several weeks now and that means the vines have woken from their winter hibernation and we are fully into bud break. The leaves on the vines are now well pushed and you can see the vines getting ready to flower. The flowering period is a critical time as this is when the vine establishes how much fruit it will carry. If the weather is not just right at flowering, few of the flowers are fertilized and that means few grapes. After two very short harvests in 2004 and 2005 we are hoping to get a full crop. For us a full crop is very small as we only project around two tons of fruit per acre even in the best years. The flowering should come in about two weeks or so and we are hoping for warm, dry weather to set a good crop. Pictured here on May 5th, are pinot noir vines in our estate Lafayette Vineyard directly beyond the winery. On the hill in the far distance, the La Colina Vineyard is also rapidly moving towards the flowering period.