Amalie Robert Estate Climate Update: April 2019

Hello and Welcome, 

  

This is an Amalie Robert Estate Climate Update: April 2019. A FLOG Communication. 

And as the first real FLOG of the year, we would like to give you a little “peak” at what you might encounter on your visit to the International Pinot Noir Celebration (IPNC) via PDX this year where Amalie Robert Estate is a featured winery.

While it looks like a snow covered mountain, it is really a giant volcano getting ready to blow. It could happen at any minute, but in geological terms a minute can be a very long time.

Did you see any purple lilacs make their stunning debut this year? Here in Wine Country that is an indicator that the Pinot Noir vines are coming around from their 6-month hiatus (Not that they really went anywhere exciting during their time off). It is also the time of year Ernie switches his morning accelerant from French Roast to Bold Italian.

Ah, springtime in Wine Country. It reminds us that while you don’t have to be crazy to grow Pinot Noir, it certainly helps. April brings all four seasons in a weekly variety show. You want a crash course in climate change? Come on out to the farm and try to get something farmin’ (related) done!

And when that magic break of sunshine does appear, you will be glad you ordered a couple hundred gallons of bio-diesel when you had the chance and before everybody else wanted theirs. Tractors and implements, when properly engaged, can affect significant change.

As in a rotation of the cover crop from the fall mix designed to feed our vines and hold the soil onto the side of the hill in the face of 45 inches of annual winter rainfall. To the spring mix that provides a wonderful environment for our beneficial insects and also fixes nitrogen to feed our vines. These little plants draw moisture from just the top few inches of soil so as not to compete with the vines. It may be the vineyard floor, but it has a job to do like everything else. It is the Master Farmer’s job to figure that out. Sustainable cover cropping - Not everybody does it, but everybody should.

As previously described, in excruciating detail, a vineyard ecosystem is quite simply the physical implementation of a mental construct, rife with the effects of unintended consequences. In software terms, when something does not do what it is supposed to do you would say “That is a feature not a bug.” In farming, when you run a little short of cover crop seeds you say, “That is an experiment and this over here is the control.”

Another common farming phrase is “I meant to do that.” With that simple phrase, you can never make a mistake. Here’s how it works. Let’s say you brew decaf for the morning accelerant – an apparent mistake. Your caffeine deprived breakfast companion catches you out. When they push the point of you having made a mistake by brewing from the wrong container, you very boldly assert, “Oh, I meant to do that.” While this may lead to further interrogation, you have absolved yourself from having made a mistake.

But this is a powerful phrase and we caution that you use it with some discretion. At work for example, when you mistakenly open an E-mail attachment that brings down the entire corporate network – worldwide. Or maybe in front of the traffic cop who is interested in learning more about your decision to run a red light. Very powerful indeed.

And guess who is making an aerial assessment of the vineyard this fine spring. Yep, it’s our winged nemesis Vespula germanica, Aka: Those Damn Yellow Jackets. But with a little ingenuity and a strong will, we can turn this event to our advantage. And have some good fun in the process.

Yellow Jackets identified – Collect all four!

This is the time of year Vespula germanica (the chubby one with the bad attitude) is looking to establish new nesting sites. That means they are buzzing about and can be trapped. April or even into May is the right time to catch these blighters so you can fatten them up all summer long. Start with the standard cylindrical Yellow Jacket trap and add your favorite attractant. We like salmon scraps for bait, because Vespula germanica likes salmon scraps. That is bioengineering here in Wine Country.

Once you lure them into the traps, you can change their diet to suit your intended uses. Corn will fatten them up just fine and is not too expensive. Of course, once they are in captivity, they become a lot less fussy from a dietary point of view. However, they can get pretty cranky depending on how successful you were at filling the traps. You will want to resist the urge to name them.

Now, fast forward to your summer BBQ on the back deck. You can add a few of your fattened-up Yellow Jackets to the Chex mix. We recommend a little extra Worchester sauce in this preparation.

It is always good fun to add them to the ice cube tray with a little food coloring to obscure their presence. We like yellow because it looks like amber from thousands of years ago. While it is not a common occurrence, they can reanimate upon thawing.

And when someone asks how a Vespula germanica got frozen in their ice cube and then flew up their left nostril, you are ready with the most appropriate response (ever) – “I meant to do that.”

Of course the more creative adults will want to pull the wings off of them. Kinda cruel we know, but just remember they do have it coming to them. And much like ordering diesel, you will want to get your Epi-Pen prescription filled before you actually need to use it.

So there it is. The vines are awake, the vineyard floor has been turned, reseeded and showered upon. And we are on the hunt for Vespula germanica. Springtime in Wine Country, vintage 2019.

And that brings us to the numbers, with a brief introduction from the patron animation of farming.

“This April it was hot, and then it was not. And sometimes it rained, but only on you and for no more than just a day or two.

Tilling the soil and mowing the grass, that doesn’t leave much time to sit around on your …”

The first number to be aware of is 60. That is 24 old G’wzr vines and 36 new G’zwr vines, while in separate blocks, they will all be in fruiting harmony this year. Add that to the 50-some thousand Chardonnay, Pinot Meunier, Pinot Noir, Syrah and Viognier vines and we have quite a unique mix of varietals here on the Estate. You may say random, we say eclectic. And yes, we meant to do that.

April Degree Days, aka heat accumulation, started the growing season off with a very respectable 105. Add another 2,000 and we can call it the vintage of the year. What follows is a somewhat brief description of the farming construct “Degree Days” for those inquiring minds that were too shy to ask or had more important mental challenges to conquer. As if…

A Degree Day is a made-up number. But it does represent the full wine growing season beginning in April through harvest. And being a number, it can be compared year to year providing all sorts of analysis paralysis (hard to do with colors). Numbers give us confidence, validation and a sense of comfort in knowing where things stand in relation to other similar things. Age, they say, is just a number, but hair loss is real.

Take wine reviews for example. Regardless of what you may have read, the 100 point scale is in reality a 16 point range from 85 to 100 inclusive. Degree Days here in Wine Country run the range from a very cool to cold growing season of around 1,700 to a very hot and intolerable 2,700. That is a 1,000 point range that provides a wide variability in the styles of wine produced from vintage to vintage.

Now wine berries have distributed themselves around the planet based on where the heat is, or is not. The Willamette Valley is a good home to Pinot Noir and other varietals that have a tendency to develop very expressive aromas and flavors while only accumulating enough sugar for moderate alcohol potentials. These two phenomena should occur at about the same time. Most of the time. And that is the time to harvest and ferment them into wine.

Other varieties grown in warmer regions, like the Napa-Sonoma nebula, would not develop aroma and flavor in the Willamette Valley before the end of the growing season. This would make poor quality wine that would have to be augmented with Syrah from eastern Washington. And the “Red Blend” category was born…

Thinking caps on. Back in the day when a loaf of bread was a quarter, Degree Days were calculated on paper ledgers using a pencil. A person with an outdoor thermometer would write down the high and low temperature of the day and average it. Please note the inherent systemic variability of sampling error in this system. If the average was below 50 degrees there were no Degree Days recorded because the vines are not getting anything done when it is that cold.

Any value above 50 degrees was written down as the Degree Days accumulated for that day. So let’s say your office thermostat is set to 72 during the working hours and 68 the rest of the time. The daily average high and low temperature is 70 degrees. That means you are accumulating 20 Degree Days per day, or about 600 degree days a month. Apply that to 7 months from April through October and you have 4,200 Degree Days in your office space. Maybe it’s time to change out the office vegetation with some Tempranillo vines.

But you don’t. Because the real average temperature is 72 degrees for about 8 hours and 68 degrees for about 16 hours providing a real average temperature of 69.33 degrees. This works out to 19.33 Degree Days per day, 580 per month and 4,060 per growing season. The variation in the vineyard space is significantly more pronounced with daily diurnal shifts covering 50 degrees or more. So just like evaluating fine wine, more samples are in order!

We derive Degree Days, as you would imagine, differently than most. Our weather station takes a reading every 12 minutes. Each 12 minute temperature reading is logged into an electronic spreadsheet that converts the temperature reading into a number representing the Degree Days for that 12 minute period. We then have the computer sum the 3,600 individual temperature Degree Day values into a monthly total. Add the months from April through harvest or October 31, whichever comes first, and that is the total Degree Days for the growing season. We then overlay the rainfall each month to add a bit of complexity to the growing season. Easy peasie, lemon squeezy.

And that is how we can tell you the high and low temperature of each and every day of the growing season and at what 12 minute interval it occurred. For April, we will just split the month into the first 15 days and the next 15 days. The first half of the month was cooler on average, with a high of 62.4 and a low of 35.1 (27.3 degree diurnal shift). The second half of the month was where the real heat was with a high of 78.4 and a very chilly low of 32.7 (45.7 degree diurnal shift). The Degree Day totals were 18 and 87, mutually exclusive and collectively exhaustive.

April 2018 came out of the gate with 110.1 degree days with a high temperature of 82.9 and a low of 31.50 degrees (51.4 degree diurnal shift). We are hoping to avoid the arid conditions that finished off that vintage, but the tail does not wag the dog as they say.

And yes, we had rain, 5.33 inches to be exact. We got all the right drops in all the right places. That served as a reminder that Ernie needs a new hat…

Join us next month when we will do a deep dive on shoot spacing, the number 12 and why you can never get rid of all those water sprouts. Here is a hint, they are called “epicormic buds.” You know, suckers.

Kindest Regards,

Dena & Ernie