Amalie Robert Estate Climate Update: 2014 August

Hello and Welcome,

There is one word to sum up the month of August and that word is “HOT.” In fact, it’s really farming hot. Too farming hot if you ask us. But as Mother Nature keeps her Stiletto heel firmly on the throttle, she has been restrained enough to keep us under 100, well almost.

This is the magic number for the vines. Below 100 degrees they just keep advancing toward harvest. If the temperature rises above 100, they want to shut down photosynthesis and protect themselves from the heat. So the 97 to 98 degree temperatures we see each afternoon are adding degree days faster than we can say “Pinot in Pink” Rosé!

And then there are the night time temperatures. So much for the diurnal cool climate viticulture of 2007, 2010 and 2011 (yeah, we are still riding those ponies…) No, not this year. Evening temperatures in the mid to upper 50’s and even into the 60’s? For farmin’ out loud woman, cut us some slack! We are just glowing like the metal on the edge of a knife…

But it’s all good. The earth remains firm under our feet. And the Syrah is looking particularly nice this year. We would hazard a guess that there won’t be all that much Rosé produced in 2014 if the lady behind the wheel keeps trying to overtake the pace car.

The big news in the vineyard is we have finally put all the vine shoots we need where they belong and hedged off the rest. It took 4 passes this year with the hedger to control the growth, but it is now finished and we can move on to thinning.

The vines are on this Earth for one thing and one thing only – to reproduce. They want to ripen their seeds and have some bird or other animal deposit them in an undisclosed location. To give themselves the best chance at this, they trained humans to tend to their every need. Then one day, a human came upon a decomposing cluster of grapes (it was actually fermenting) and ate it. As our hero awoke, the search was on for more of these clusters. And that is when the trainer became the trained.

The humans began to remove some clusters of grapes from the vine that didn’t look quite right, or taste very good (that was their first clue.) They selected the green bunches when most of the bunches were deep burgundy in color. They emphatically cut the wings from the cluster which everyone knows ripens a week or so late. They even built structures out of posts and wires to get the clusters up off of the ground to make their work easier.

Soon the vines were trapped in trellis structures and trained to grow in a Vertical Shoot Positioned (VSP) way designed by the humans for one purpose – to produce wine so they could reproduce. The vine was forced to submit, but turned a blind eye to this activity.

In the world of wine quality that is influenced in the vineyard, thinning is where you create the potential for the most superior wines. We say potential because once the grapes leave the vineyard where Mother Nature reigns supreme, they go to the winery where there are humans asserting control. And as we see from the previous example, humans can be a devious sort.

At Amalie Robert Estate, we look at thinning as our opportunity to select the best fruit from our 45,000 vines. And since we grow all of our own fruit it is up to us to get it right.  The theory here is we only want ripe and wonderfully expressive clusters of wineberries to end up in our fermentations. There are several schools of thought on how to select those clusters and differing ways of doing the work. That’s the thing about farming, somebody has to actually do the work.

Well, here is how we do it. First we try and figure out how to get a single bottle of wine from each of our 45,000 little winemaker trainees. This usually means about 2.75 pounds of wineberries per vine. In Pinot Noir we like to see that 2.75 pounds spread over about 10 to 12 clusters of wineberries.

The vines have other designs. Sometimes it takes 20 clusters to get there, other times we can get there with just 8. It all depends on what was happening in June when the vines were flowering and trying to set fruit. So we need to take detailed cluster counts and weights from several samples throughout the vineyard. We might even read the expertly prepared June Climate Update to remind us what was happening.

These cluster counts and corresponding weights go into the random number generator that produces a thinning plan to tell us how many clusters we need to remove per vine “on average.” But in farming there is no “average” vine. The average vine is an imaginary construct to give the humans some reference on what to do. For example, we do not see too many vines out there with 20.58 clusters on them. Its 20 or 21 kid, take your pick.

So let’s say the average vine has 20.58 clusters on it and we need just 14 to get us to one bottle of wine per vine. Here is where you say, “That’s easy! Just cut off 7 clusters per vine and you are there.” And then Ernie says, “Right, but which ones?” Note: This is a far better condition than having 14.2 clusters per vine and needing 16.

And here is where we get down to the cluster cutting. Without going into too much detail, the best clusters on a vine are usually grown at the end of the cane. We know this because Dick Erath said so after he did repeated and replicated trials over several years. ‘nuff said.

So we like to leave those clusters at the end of the vine, unless they are compromised in some way, then they have to go. That means we tend to remove the clusters, with the lowest ripening potential, closest to the head of the vine. And then there are the wings.

The wings always have to go, those little green blighters. They are always a week or so behind. They flower late, they change color late and they sweeten up late, if at all. We just can’t be associated with them so we cut them off. They are akin to the perpetual college student…

So at the end of the cane, our most prized fruit is - at the end of the cane. These are the clusters of wineberries that have the highest quality potential as long as Ernie has his farming plan dialed in – and he does. That man burns Bio-Diesel at 2.5 miles per hour like nobody’s business. The rest is up to that speed crazed woman flogging a hot lap vintage to which we are much more than just casual observers.

“All the world's indeed a stage. And we are merely players. Performers and portrayers. Each another's audience. Outside the gilded cage.” - Rush

Here are the numbers. We ask that you not print this page for fear of spontaneous combustion. Yeah, they’re hot…

We have recorded 615.2 degree days for the month of August, providing a total of 1,886 degree days since the beginning of the growing season on April 1, 2014. The heat accumulation for the 2014 growing season thorough August exceeds the total growing season heat accumulation for two of the last four vintages. And if we were to pontificate on what September holds, which we won’t, but if we did, it could be that the 2014 vintage turns in the most blistering performance since the 2003 vintage tallied 2,699 degree days. Nah, never happen…

But rain it did, just a bit, on the 30th for a little while. Mostly slug and fungus class precipitation, but it prevented another 100 degree day. The last precipitation was during the trundling thunder cloud burst around the middle of month. Other than that it has been dry and dusty. But still, it was a turn, perhaps, for a little coastal influence in the morning to provide some welcome cooling. It could happen or it could rain, or not. But in farming there is no try – you do or you do not.

Some of the more astute readers of this FLOG may well remember September 2013 when we had tropical storm Pabuk dump 9” of rain in the Pacific Northwest in 4 days. Along with the yearly equipment maintenance, this is just a small, but significant part of the inherent joy of farming. Total precipitation for the month of August is 0.11 inches providing a 2014 growing season total of 6.79 inches.

This is what we had to say last August (Pre-Pabuk):

We have recorded 524 degree days for the month of August, providing a total of 1,737 degree days since the beginning of the growing season on April 1, 2013 (Julian calendar day 91.) For analytical comparative purposes only, the 2010 vintage only recorded 1,722 degree days through the end of OctoBERRRR.

So that leaves us with the months of September and maybe October if we can hang it out that long. We have never started harvest here in September, but it could happen this year. We will keep an eye on the tried and true Walnut tree. Nothing gets harvested here until that tree gives us some yellow leaves signaling the harvest window is open.

On the far side of harvest lies the Syrah. Usually a November picking date, but we’ll just have to wait and see. Or maybe we won’t have to wait, we’ll see.

Kindest Regards,

Dena & Ernie