Climate Update: May 2023
Hello and Welcome,
This is the May Climate Update from Amalie Robert Estate. The month of May in Willamette Valley wine country has come and gone. That’s two months down, and with an expected October harvest, that leaves us a scant 4 months to go. Looking out at our 35 acre expanse of vineyard today, it is hard to believe we will be harvesting some 70 tons of wine berries in about 120 days. But the vines have a schedule, and it starts with Pinot Noir flowers. They could come along anytime now. But not today.
The BIG Picture
Once those Willamette Valley Pinot Noir flowers open up and pollinate, we add 105 days and then they are ready to be plucked from the Mother vine. They are not there yet, and that’s OK. There are plenty of other tasks to occupy our time. And that’s when it hits you. You have been so busy doing everything else that you forgot to do laundry (or go buy food) and now have no clean underwear, or food to eat. But, we do have wine...
The most pressing and timely task is raising trellis wires to capture the vines’ growth. We use three sets of wires throughout the growing season. The first set is at about 8 inches, the next set is another 24 inches up and the top trellis wires are at 60 inches. The idea is to get the shoots tucked into these wires without having them crisscrossed. While vines are not sentient beings, straightening up their shoots in the trellis wires is a lot like herding cats.
Raising catch wires and straightening out the vine’s shoots represents the bulk of our field labor budget. After that, we will be thinning clusters from the vines to maximize wine quality through yield control and cluster selections. Ernie has a detailed algorithm for determining just which clusters get cut. Sometimes he uses it. Other times he shoots from the hip with a little Kentucky windage. Sometimes close enough is just that.
And then there is the Great Cluster Pluck, where the limited supply of harvest hands will be allocated throughout the Willamette Valley. However, the demand for hand harvesting is starting to be offset by machine harvesting. Not at Amalie Robert Estate of course, but those harvest machines are out there, and closer than you might think. And that is good news for us and other top tier vineyards that are competing for harvest labor.
We thought a little product differentiation on our label regarding harvest practices would be useful information to consumers and trade buyers alike. "Hand Harvested" goes hand in hand with another technical term “Estate Bottled” which according to the TTB means:
“Estate bottled” means that 100 percent of the wine came from grapes grown on land owned or controlled by the winery, and both the winery and the vineyard must be located within the boundaries of the labeled viticultural area. The winery must crush and ferment the grapes, and finish, age, process, and bottle the wine in a continuous process on its premises (the wine at no time having left the premises of the bottling winery).
We are Living the Dream, so You Don’t Have To!
Winemaking: The Continuation of Terroir by Other Means. ® is our story. An unfinished set of autobiographical stories reflecting our agrarian endeavor, marked by “unfortunate, but not uncommon” experiences and easily referenced by vintage. Irreverently referred to as the FLOG (Farming bLOG), it captures our 20+ year journey of making a winegrowing life in Willamette Valley wine country. The FLOG is available to read on Substack for FREE.
If you are not afraid of commitment, you can even subscribe so as not to miss a single FLOG. Also, FREE. And if you want to see what we think is worth seeing on a more regular basis, follow us on Instagram @AmalieRobert. It’s FREE! It's ALL FREE!
Are you planning to enjoy traveling again, attending Oregon Pinot Camp, and exploring the Willamette Valley? We know you want to! Go ahead, be the smartest person in the room by downloading our FREE guide to the Willamette Valley sub-AVA's! Here are the 11 Willamette Valley sub-AVA’s listed by acreage, as of May 2023:
We are open by appointment for the entire month of June! You can request a tasting appointment with your preferred day and time. Dena will confirm your appointment and create a tasting event specific to your party – that’s the way we do it. We are also a featured winery in the International Pinot Noir Celebration (IPNC) this year! If we don’t see you here, maybe we we will see you there.
Keep in mind, wine flies FREE from 32 west coast cities on Alaska Airlines. This includes our two closest airports Eugene (EUG) and Portland (PDX). Amalie Robert Estate is open year-round by appointment for vineyard tours and tastings.
Note: Your appointment may collide with a soaring red-tailed hawk. Raptors are in the air patrolling the vineyard for those pesky gophers and other rodents. We are a dog friendly site, but it's a best practice to keep small dogs close by. You can learn more about who we are and what we believe by taking our Virtual Tour!
Digital Distribution is Here!
We believe the future of wine is DIGITAL Distribution! Say goodbye to sales reps and warehouses, and hello to customer service and WINERY DIRECT relationships!
Bypass the distributor and work DIRECTLY with the winery. This is the future calling! No longer are you constrained by what some distributor decides you can sell. Forget that! You can bypass the distributor and have DIRECT ACCESS to our FULL Portfolio!
Any Wine, Any Place, Any Where, Any Time! The wine comes DIRECTLY from our winery delivered to your restaurant or retail door via FedEx. Usually within a week, or less! And it is fully 3-Tier compliant! All of the logistics and compliance rolled into one without any of the baggage! How cool is that?! ALL 👍 NO 💩.
We are currently offering Digital Distribution in California, Florida, Georgia, Illinois, New York, New Jersey, Oregon and Washington. If Digital Distribution sounds like it is too good to be true, let us show you how it can benefit you! Please E-mail Dena@AmalieRobert.com to learn more.
The Main Story
Machine learning, artificial intelligence and the myriad of other schemes to replace organic critical thinking (and human cost) with automated processes is the current state of our species' evolution. This trend began quite some time ago with the touchtone phone. The touchtone phone was a great improvement over the rotary dial phone. Instead of putting your finger in a little hole and making circles, you just pressed a series of numbers or alphanumeric codes.
The touchtone phone included helpful consumer features such as one button calling to a list of frequently called numbers. You could also check stock quotes. Eventually voicemail was available. There were several benefits and consumers predictably adopted the touchtone phone.
That’s when they set the hook. Not long thereafter there were the byzantine phone mazes that separated you from any real customer service human beings. “Please listen carefully as our menu options have changed…” Today, it is nearly impossible to speak with a carbon-based life form in your own native language. Chat bots, automated sequences and “the app” have replaced us. The Matrix is real.
In the agrarian endeavor, machine learning really comes down to machine OPERATOR LEARNING. The tractor, or mower, or rototiller is going to do what it does. And what agricultural equipment is generally designed to do, is operate within operational parameters for a period of time up to, but not to exceed, its limited warranty. While salespeople will hound you to the end of the earth, service people are much more elusive. So, it is up to the OPERATOR to LEARN the idiosyncrasies specific to each individual piece of agricultural equipment that is relied upon to produce an economically viable crop, or value-added product.
Implements that attach to tractors are generally pretty straightforward. They require grease and periodic torqueing or tensioning of certain assemblies. Anything that makes contact with the earth will need to be replaced over some period of time. In our marine sediment soil, aka sand, it doesn’t take long to wear down a set of rototiller blades. While not exactly intuitive, implements are not necessarily overly complex. The key is to write down what you did to repair the equipment so the next time it happens, you only lose an afternoon of productivity, not several days. And heaven forbid something goes wrong on a holiday weekend!
Tractors are a world of their own. While they are never going to be reliable, they are predicable. Ernie has Italian tractors. Three of them. Each one came with an operator’s guide. However, theses guides were all written in their native Italian language. To produce the English version, it seems they just substituted the closest English word for the original Italian word and Voila! It’s done! Not exactly the translation skills required to avoid a thermonuclear war at the UN.
What Does This Mean and Why Should I Care?
Ernie is weird. He is the kind of guy that reads his insurance policies. While somewhat of a foreign language, based primarily on case law, insurance policies boil down to contracts. If we pay this premium, then you will cover any losses that occur from these listed perils up to a certain dollar limit. Fine.
But when it comes to getting an $80k Italian tractor to start, or to move forward, or shift to low range, these operator’s manuals represent little more than Rorschach inkblots. Depending on where you put the verb, or whatever that conjugation is really supposed to mean, there are a variety of interpretations.
Alarm code 80, while thoroughly vexing, is simply an "open circuit detected". Sure it is, but where and how does one close the circuit and resume farming operations? At the end of the day, percussive maintenance is always an option. If it breaks, it probably needed replacing anyway. Machine learning? Oh please, I think I am going to download…
The Numbers
We know you want them, so we put them at the bottom where they are easy to find. May continued April’s on-again off-again climatic relationship with the Willamette Valley Pinot Noir winegrower. As you can easily see here, Mother Nature has a difficult time coloring between the lines. Neither reliable nor predictable…
We have recorded 342.4 Degree Days for the month of May, bringing the 2023 vintage to date total to 432.6 Degree Days. The high temperature was 93.4 degrees on May 14th at 4:00 pm and a low of 38.3 degrees on May 7th at 5:24 am. Rainfall for the month of May 2023 was 0.30 inches, and when added to April’s rainfall of 7.28 inches, yields a growing season to date 7.58 inches of rainfall.
Degree Days is farmer speak for measuring the heat accumulation from the vintage. If the daily average temperature is below 50 degrees, we do not accumulate any Degree Days. If the daily average is above 50 degrees, we accumulate the value above 50 degrees for each day from April through September. The total is the Degree Day accumulation for the vintage.
The Canadian wildfires have consumed upwards of 8.1 million acres in 2023. A typical fire season in Canada is about 600,000 acres. They are now on our radar as we plan for harvest. Our next significant vineyard event is flowers. That pretty much sets the schedule for the rest of the growing season. When we see them, you will be the first to know!
Kindest Regards,
Dena & Ernie