While the harvest all around Oregon is winding down, the grapes on our estate vineyard continue to develop. Located in the cooler climate of the Van Duzer corridor, our grapes are ripening more slowly than others and the cool nights and warm afternoons have meant that a natural, bright acidity is maintained while the complex flavors of Pinot Noir slowly develop. I’ve spent a lot of time during the last few months visiting vineyards with Joe, and I’m pretty sure our grapes are going to be some of the tastiest in Oregon.
One of the things that Joe has noticed is that the grapes in our vineyard seem to have the thickest skins of any other vineyard we’ve visited this year. This is a good thing, not just because you can make fun of them and they won’t mind, but also because by the time this update has been published, the rain will have begun to fall. Were our grapes not in as good of condition, much of which is attributable to the thicker skins, we’d have been forced to pick earlier than we’d have liked, worried that the rain might bring Botrytis, a fungal disease of the vine associated with wet weather.
If you could have woken up before dawn to meet me in the vineyard for the sunrise this past week, you’d have been cold but you would have seen from atop the hill that thick fog covered everything until the sun rose. As the fog flowed down the valley and away, the bright sun of cloudless days lit up rainbows in the fog. With the sun, the rainbows, and the grapes becoming more delicious by the minute, now is a good time to be a vineyard guy.
But it’s been a lot of long days without rest to get to this point. The bird pressure is increasing, and the struggle against the flocks of starlings has begun in earnest. Until the grapes are harvested, they are our foes and as I tear after them on the ATV, I sometimes wonder if they are laughing at me as they lift into the sky and fly away.
Although we haven’t yet harvested our bumper crop, we’re already planning our strategies for future vintages. We prepared the soil for seeding our winter’s cover crop, and have engineered a special blend of grasses, grains and legumes for biomass, nutrients and plant diversity. I’ll mow and disk these crops into the soil, where they’ll compost into richer soil.
I’ve been demarcating the soils that are thinner or have higher clay content by taking advantage of the more pronounced fall colors in the canopies of stressed vines. We’ll prune the vines in those areas back a bit more this winter, and in the spring I’ll cultivate the soil. In a year, I’ll seed those areas with a cover crop, and over a course of years, the vineyard will gracefully balance itself, providing more consistent ripening.
Pinot Noir is the most genetically complex of all grapevines, and the one most likely to mutate into new forms of grape. Pinot Gris is a lighter-colored variety, and Pinot Blanc its mutant. We have a few vines of Pinot Gris that spontaneously mutated into a new form of white grape. So far, I’ve found three vines in our 200 acres. I flagged and marked them so that when they’re pruned, I’ll make sure to save their cuttings, which I’ll preserve and propagate them in the spring. Smaller in size than and differing in taste from the Pinot Blanc we have planted, it’s going to be a very interesting thing to see over the next few years how these grow and what sort of wine results. My guess is that because the change occurred in our own vineyard, it will be a vine that’s suited to the terroir of our site and perhaps bet expresses its unique nature.
That’s all for now. I’ve got starlings to go beat up. Wish me luck.
