Amalie Robert Estate Climate Update: August 2019

Hello and Welcome, 

  

The is the Amalie Robert Estate Climate Update: August 2019. A FLOG Communication from @AmalieRobert Estate. 

  

We apologize for the belated FLOG'ing as we have been set upon by the Great Cluster Pluck of 2019! 

Ah, the AUG FLOG. We have been waiting all year for this one. By the time most folks read this, the heavy lifting in the vineyard will be finished and we are on final approach to the Great Cluster Pluck of 2019. Hell may be coming to breakfast, but harvest is coming to wine country.

And no one loves harvest more than V. Germanica, aka the German yellow jacket. He is the not so cute one, second from the left.

 

And a more recent addition to the harvest matrix is his distant, and significantly larger cousin, the Bald Faced hornet. It’s not really a hornet, but in fact a dreadnought variant yellow jacket wasp. No matter, these bastards live in above ground, highly flammable, paper nests and are quite aggressive when YOU interact with THEIR environment. And they define their environment as anywhere they happen to be at any given time. Watch out!

Skunks will dig up yellow jacket nests and eradicate them for you. Bald Faced hornets, however, are best handled with fire. While at times impractical, the flame thrower is a highly effective tool.

“Captain, I suggest running a level 1 diagnostic.”

And then there is that. Ernie has been working on his upcoming “Star Trek into Wine Country” piece, and we seem to have lost some editorial containment between the two data sets.

“I will try and compensate.”

“Make it so.”

August is the time we start “fine tuning” or “manicuring” the vines and hope Mother Nature has a like minded approach. Mani-Pedi and a glass of wine anyone? The past few vintages have seen arid conditions from August through harvest. Fortunately, this year we have seen much more moderate temperatures and even a little August rain. Pretty Farmin’ Nice is how Ernie would describe vintage 2019, so far. And when we get it in the winery, our job is not to bucket-up.

And as foretold in the June Climate Update, we will do a “Rootstock Deep Dive.” Yeah, we are gonna get right down into the effective rooting zone. Look for topics such as available soil moisture and its impact on harvest dates. Then we will do a fruit zone pop-up where we will look forward into the weather at harvest.

“Captain, I am detecting nothing on long range sensors.”

“Helm, maintain course and speed.”

So, you may be wondering just exactly what do we mean by “fine tuning” or “manicuring” the vines. Well, let’s look at it from the vine’s perspective first. Here is what they have been doing all summer long. They have been growing out shoots and leaves and setting literally tons of wine berry clusters, including some in the most inappropriate places.

The reason they do this is they want to reproduce. They need to ripen their seeds and have some vineyard pest such as a bird, racoon, deer or other creature, big or small, ingest the seeds and deposit them (with a bit of fertilizer) in a different location. When this chain of events has occurred, the vine has completed its preprogrammed task. The leaves will senesce providing a beautiful vineyard patina, and then the vine will go dormant for about 6 months. At which point, it will spring to life and start the cycle all over again. Unless some nefarious gopher gnaws its roots off. Like it or not, Mr. Gopher is part of the farming lifecycle. And Ernie doesn’t like it, but it keeps his nursery man in business.

Now, let’s have a look at what we want from the Great Cluster Pluck of 2019. We are wanting a block by block Cluster Plucking of wine berries that uniformly reflect their growing season, not too much sugar, more red fruited aroma and flavor from the skins and no mold, mildew, rot or other irregularities to sort out. And this year we will be plucking 42 +1 blocks. The Gewürztraminer colonized the rootstock block, that’s our +1.

Now, how do we achieve the subset of wine berries we want to Cluster Pluck from the superset of wine berries the vines want to produce? That’s easy! We spend the month of August cutting off everything we do not want in the fermenters.

“Sir, Occam’s Razor is a mid-14th century Earth …”

“Mr. Data, isn’t it about time you ran a level 1 self-diagnostic?

In replicate.

In private.”

He’s right, you know. The simplest answer is often the most correct. Through trial and error, paying attention, and listening to Dick Erath we have a very simple to understand and easy to implement thinning plan. The only issue we have is replicating this thinning plan over about 55,000 vines. All done by hand, one cluster at a time. Oh, and we nip off the late to ripen wings.

“Except for blocks 1, 14 and 15. The wings from those 3 most amazing blocks make a beautiful Blanc de Noir still Rosé. Everything you need to make a stunning Bellpine Pearl Rosé wine is available to you in those three perfectly tended blocks representing Pinot Meunier, Pommard and Wadenswil clone Pinot Noir. Are you ready for the Great Cluster Pluck of 2019?!” @GordonRamsay, is that you?

Right. So here we are in August nipping off extra clusters that the vine has set, wings from the clusters we want to Cluster Pluck and the thirds. The thirds are the vine’s way of showing off. Most shoots have 2 clusters of wine berries, sometimes just one, but usually two. Occasionally, we will have a third cluster of wine berries on a shoot. And this cluster will look ripe, but it is not ripe.

And if it gets left on the shoot the two clusters below it will not achieve their full potential. So, a quick snip is all it takes to improve your wine quality. This fine tuning in the vineyard pass costs just about 1 minute per vine, by 55,000 vines, by the prevailing wage. But, once the Great Cluster Pluck starts, there is little time to cull out these under-ripe clusters.

And all the while these clusters are anywhere from fully purple to a mix of half purple and half green to mostly all green. The later into August we go, we favor thinning off the more green clusters. Now some of these clusters will, as if by magic, find their way from the vineyard floor into the harvest buckets anyway. A mystery wrapped in an enigma to be sorted out at the harvest trailer, before the wine berries ever make it to the winery.

To address the notion that the goal is to just leave the vine alone and then make the best of it with the wine, is not a philosophy adopted by @AmalieRobert. We would venture to guess there is a fair bit of sorting out involved with that method.

At this juncture, everyone take a deep breath or allocate another portion of wine to your glass – even if you must open a second bottle to do so. We are going on a “Rootstock Deep Dive” into the effective rooting zone. Watch out for nematodes. And if you find Ernie’s 11/16” wrench, please speak up.

“Captain! Klingon Warbird decloaking at the edge of the Neutral Zone!”

“Mr. Warf, I have had just about enough of this. Charge the forward phaser array and load photon torpedoes.”

Ernie used to race the ¼ mile track at Spokane International Raceway park, mostly just for shitz and grinz. Not that difficult really. When the Christmas tree turns from yellow to green, you just mash your foot down on the throttle. After 1,320 feet, you can let off the gas and drop the anchors. Pretty easy. But if you want to actually win some races, and not just burn rubber, it is a bit more complicated. Speed costs. How fast do you want to go? Note: Having the fastest car in town comes with some unwanted recognition.

Similarly, making wine is not that difficult. Humans have been fermenting grapes for centuries, whether they knew what they were doing or not. The good news is that fermented grape juice, even when it is bad, is not lethal. Hence the continuing evolution of wine quality vis-à-vis the human condition. Why even at a certain point in the United States history, wine was prescribed for medicinal purposes, because otherwise it was a controlled substance. Is this a great country or what? Note: Having the highest rated syrah from the Willamette Valley also comes with some notoriety.

Rootstocks are the connection between your inherent terroir and your human terroir. The soil is the soil and as a winegrower your job is to know your dirt. To be a Master Farmer is to know what rootstocks to put into your terroir that will produce the highest quality wine berries across all varieties, and vintages. Of course, you cannot know this empirically when you buy a cherry orchard, but that orchard left us plenty of clues. That and the 60 odd soil pits we dug before we selected and then planted our grafted vines.

When the Drouhins came to town in the 1980s, they bought volcanic Jory soil in Dundee. They planted vines and enlisted Ernie Munch to build them a winery. Ernie was the only architect to tell them what they were planning to do would not work. They hired Ernie, planted grafted vines and made it work.

So one day, our Ernie met Robert Drouhin in the famed Seven Springs vineyard where he was sampling wine berries and putting them in Ziplock bags to take back to the winery for analysis. And that is when Ernie popped the question. (His recollection of events is chronicled below.)

“How is Clos de Mouches looking this year?”

“Ah, you know where the good wine is made! It is very nice this year.”

“Robert, when you planted Pinot Noir in Dundee, what rootstocks did you use?”

“We planted on 3309 and 101-14. Of course, we have irrigation here.”

“Yes, of course. Why did you choose those rootstocks for Oregon? Was it based on your experience in Burgundy?”

“Well, no. You see in Oregon, it was all we could get!”

"It was all we could get." Hmmm. Of all the rootstocks available, the only grafted vines they could get in Oregon were some of the shallowest rooting in all the world. But they have irrigation, so they could augment their available soil moisture during the beautiful sunny and dry months of August and September.

Now some of you may be wondering why there is so much to-do about rootstocks. We are going to address that right now. Rootstocks are the part of a grafted vine that grows roots, obviously. Rootstocks are grafted (at the crown) onto grape varieties such as Pinot Noir that grow above ground and bear wine berries.

The significance of any given rootstock is measured in how deep the roots go looking for water. And sure, we want to know if they are resistant to nematodes and phylloxera. Those are soil borne pests that can significantly tax a vines energy by feeding on the roots vascular system, or even kill it. Akin to leaches on humans, another medical treatment gone awry. Maybe, why not just write me a scrip for some wine?

Here is an interesting chart. It reveals the parent material of a whole host of grapevine rootstocks. Rootstocks are made from crossing two subspecies of American grape that grew up with phylloxera and can protect themselves from that pest. Most rootstocks have two parents, such as Schwarzmann which is the result of crossing Riparia Gloire and Rupestris. See it, right there in the middle? However, there are rootstocks that have three parents. Can you find 44-53 Malégue? Yeah, Ernie has some of that grafted onto Pinot Meunier, Chardonnay and Pinot Noir. Correct, that is Champagne Deconstructed!

And here is yet another illuminating illustration. It illustrates a vine’s world when planted in a vineyard spaced 1.5 meters (about 60 inches) for the tractor and 2.2 meters (about 80 inches) between each vine. But that’s not important. What is important is the distribution of the roots penetrating through the surface soil, sub-surface soil, subsoil and subsolum.

The upper most roots in the surface soil are picking up most of the nutrients that feed the vine. This is where the fencepost rots, as they say, and it is where most nutrient recycling occurs. The greens and the browns are tilled into this soil layer and soil borne organisms decompose the material to provide nutrients for the vine. The rest of the roots are in a race to the bottom. The deeper the roots go, the more likely they will find water to sustain the vine during drought (Xeric) conditions.

And this is where the rootstock selection becomes critically important. Once we identify the rootstocks that can protect the vine from nematodes and phylloxera, we are looking primarily for rooting depth.

The key here is to match the depth of the roots with available soil moisture. Based on empirical evidence we know the rooting proclivities of the rootstocks listed in the spaghetti graphic provided above. They are as follows:

Shallow roots: Riparia Gloire

Moderately shallow roots: 101-14, 3309, Schwarzmann

Moderately deep roots: 44-53M

Deep roots: 5C, own rooted (not grafted) vines

The next topic is available soil moisture, what is it and why is it important. Soil moisture is just that, it is water that it is dissolved in the soil. But it may be that there is so little of it, the vine roots cannot separate the water from the soil. Hence there is no soil moisture available to the vine.

@AmalieRobert is a dry farmed Estate. We knew that we wanted that expression of our terroir when we selected our rootstocks and began planting at the turn of the century. We also knew that our Bellpine soil taxonomy is classified as “Xeric Haplohumults”. That mouthful of marbles and toothpicks simply means “The soils are usually moist but are dry for 45 to 60 consecutive days during the summer between depths of 4 and 12 inches”. During the summer, there is no available soil moisture in the top 12 inches of soil. Good to know when you are selecting rootstocks.

The concept to retain here is, as the growing season progresses to harvest time, the soil moisture available to the vine goes deeper and deeper into the soil profile. Shallow rooted vines go without water and deeper-rooted vines are still drawing moisture from the soil.

Matching rootstocks to available soil moisture. Here we will introduce the most common rootstocks planted in the Willamette Valley, which are all phylloxera tolerant, and then we will talk about the rootstock less used (and Ernie’s favorite), 5C.

The shallowest rootstock is known as RG, as in Riparia Gloire. It has the shallowest effective rooting zone of all the rootstocks commonly in use. Normally planted in very deep and wet soils or dry soils where effective soil moisture is controlled with irrigation.

101-14 Mgt, 3309 and Schwarzmann are all crosses of Riparia Gloire and Rupesteris and are all phylloxera tolerant. They are all very similar in that they have a bit deeper effective rooting zone than RG. However, they have varying degrees of nematode resistance, with 3309 being the most susceptible. Nematodes are very small subterranean blighters that tap into the roots and feed off the vascular tissue. As noted above, of the endless medical treatments available, a prescription of wine can be a pretty good remedy.

The 44-53M rootstock is a bit of an odd ball as it has 3 parents. Not something you see every day. It is a three-way cross between RG and Rupesteris and Berlandiari. The effective rooting zone is a bit deeper than the aforementioned group, with one distinction. This rootstock does not pick up magnesium from your terroir very well. This becomes quite obvious later in the season as the vine begins to move magnesium around from the old leaves to the new leaves. The old leaves look like they have a red border in Pinot Noir, or yellow in Chardonnay.

And we sum up with own rooted vines which tend to be deeper rooted than any of these rootstocks. Grapevine roots have been found at 6 feet deep and beyond when the soil conditions allow. The problem own rooted vines have is that they cannot tolerate phylloxera. The little blighter taps into the roots and creates an opening where all manner of bad actors in the soil enter the vines vascular tissue eventually killing it. Hence the reason for the phylloxera tolerant grafted vine discussion.

And that brings us to the 5C rootstock. This rootstock has the deepest effective rooting zone of all the rootstocks noted above and is the most on par with own rooted vines. Now we are getting somewhere, deep! And it is tolerant to phylloxera meaning the blighter still taps into it, but the vine is able to protect itself from the pathogens that live in the soil. However, as strong a rootstock that it is, 5C is just as susceptible to “tractor blight” as all the rest. Maybe time to tighten the loose nut behind the wheel.

Now, let’s put the roots in the soil profile and head on into harvest. The rootstock is interacting with all the stratums of the soil. The soil has a depleting supply of moisture as the Great Cluster Pluck approaches. The vine is depending on its deepest roots to access available soil moisture. The vine is using soil moisture to cool the leaves and translocate nutrients throughout the vascular tissue. So far all is right in the plant kingdom.

As the weeks turn to the days leading up to the Great Cluster Pluck, winemakers must decide when to “pull the trigger” and start plucking clusters. A tremendous amount of contemplation, consternation and even some constipation occurs during this time frame.

The vines, and in turn the subject of our discussion, the wine berries, are pre-programmed. If their roots have access to available soil moisture, they are in no hurry. They gradually increase sugars by using their malic acid as an energy source thus becoming sweeter. The skins continue to develop aroma and flavor. Eventually the sugars reach a range of around 23 Brix and the acids drop down to give us a pH around 3.4 to 3.6. When these factors align with a very pleasurable aroma and flavor profile, it is time to get out the harvest buckets.

If you have shallow roots in a dry, well drained hillside that hasn’t seen rain for 60 days, life is markedly different. The vine has taken all of the available soil moisture available to the roots and is now translocating water from the wine berry to sustain itself. The wine berry is now starting to desiccate. The wine berry is losing water and concentrating its sugar and acid, without much advancement in aroma and flavor development.

In the lab, you see the sugar concentration increasing which is normal, and the acid concentration is rising as well. This is not normal, it tells you the berry is losing water, not ripening. Once the sugars reach about 25 Brix, or 15% alcohol potential, you most likely have missed the optimal harvest window. Elvis has left the building.

“Captain, they are coming about!”

What comes about, goes about and climate change has brought this issue to the fore. Shallow rooting rootstocks have a natural tendency to advance the harvest window by a few days. The desire to Cluster Pluck before the birds, rain and the rot visit themselves upon the vineyard is a strong one. However, that desire must be tempered with our goal of producing world class wines in every vintage, climatically challenging or not. Nothing ventured, nothing gained.

“Fire phasers and photon torpedoes, full spread!”

@AmalieRobert 5C is the rootstock of choice that spans the full spectrum of climatically challenging growing conditions. 5C can tolerate longer drought conditions and still achieve elegant aromas and flavors. In cool vintages we can adjust our canopy management and vineyard floor vegetation to achieve aroma and flavor ripeness. As we compare Cluster Pluck dates with some old timers who still grow own rooted vines, we see a strong correlation in own rooted vines and that handsome 5C rootstock.

And now what you have all been so patiently waiting for, the numbers. Our slow and steady march to the Great Cluster Pluck of 2019 continues unabated - one day at a time. August provided very moderate temperatures and a little tinkle of rain. Our neighbors to the south have yet to really set themselves on fire, so we don’t have smoke taint to worry about. Or excessive atmospheric particulate that prevents us from cooling down at night.

The month of August continued the everything in moderation theme, and then promptly put moderation in moderation with a significant ramp up in heat for month end. Let’s break it down like this.

August 1 through 15 recorded 273.1 Degree Days with a high temperature of 92.8 recorded on August 4, 4:12 pm and a low temperature of 50.5 degrees on August 11 from 3:00 am through 4:00 am. This represents a diurnal shift of 42.3 degrees during the first half of August. Rain was a trace at 0.02 inches.

The second half of the second half of the month of August provided the heat we had been expecting all month long. The last week of August saw temperatures cresting the 100 degree mark at the farm. But a fast horse doesn’t run long, and the intense heat was not sustained for more than a couple of days. Ernie is still suffering flashbacks of vintage 2018. Note the 55 degree diurnal shift listed in the Salem weather graph for Tuesday, August 27.

The high temperature for the second half of the month was 100.1 degrees recorded on Tuesday, August 27 at 4:12 pm. And get this, the low temperature for the second half of the month was 49.1 degrees recorded on August 22 at 5:36 am. August 22 brought 0.07 inches of rainfall.

The second half of the month recorded 321.7 Degree Days for a monthly total of 594.8. The year to date growing Degree Days stand at 1,903.7, compared with 1,954.4 from vintage 2018. Whoa!

Whoa! When I say whoa, I mean WHOA!

- Yosemite Sam 

Kindest Regards,

Dena & Ernie

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