A special section of The Healdsburg Tribune, The Cloverdale Reveille, The Windsor Times and Sonoma West Times & News
October 29, 2015
Vintage 2015: Dusty and difficult by Rollie Atkinson Staff Writer While everyone else was casting their eyes on the drought-stricken skies this past growing season, winegrape growers were keeping their heads down in their vineyard rows, closely monitoring their crop that had gotten off to a very uneven start back in the spring. Rain — and enough moisture in the soil — wasn’t going to be the big problem this year. A December deluge and a spate of late spring showers took care of that. Instead, figuring out the crazy patterns of “hens and chicks” fruit set, spotty ripening and incidents of cluster shatter is what now has many growers calling the 2015 harvest “a difficult one.” Although facing a fourth consecutive year of official drought conditions, Sonoma County winegrape growers also were coming off three tremendous years of high yields, solid prices and textbook late-summer harvest conditions. The skies may have been empty but most wine tanks were full and overflowing. All the news and talk about California’s historical drought focused more on wildfire dangers, brown lawns and mounting murmurs about “climate change.” Other farmers with crops like hay, grain, livestock, chickens and apples definitely took hits from the lousy weather and leaving everyone praying for the promise of an El Niño and a
Photo provided by Rafanelli Winery
EARLY GRAPES — Following a mild winter with another year of record high temperature averages, Sonoma County’s 2015 winegrape crop was one of the earliest on record. Crews for Rafanelli Winery (in photo) fininshed their Dry Creek Valley picking before the end of September.
wet winter. “We might be seeing a new pattern,” said Tony Linegar, the county’s agriculture commissioner. “We’ve definitely been having some very mild years, with warm winters and different rain patterns.” New statistics from recent growing years could lead to refinements of offical long range models. “I think it’s unclear right now,” Linegar said. Winegrape growers would prefer 2015 to not be a pattern that gets repeated anytime soon. Overall harvest yields were reported to be 40-50 per-
cent below last year’s nearrecord totals and 30 percent below what most growers would call an “average” crop. The 2015 winegrape harvest was one of the earliest on record, with the first grapes picked in mid-July and almost all growers and vineyard crews done by the end of September. Following the very mild winter, bud break and blooming started as much as two weeks early in March. That was followed by erratic temperatures and rains that messed up uniform fruit set and cast the fortune and final
outcomes of the 2015 harvest, now resting in winery tanks and being studied by winemakers. Ultimately, most vines and vineyards delivered wellripened fruit, with near-optimal colors and flavors, thanks to some extra patience from vineyard management teams and a stretched-out harvesting season. Most of the crop produced smaller berries with high tanins and acids. Growers actually backed-off their irrigation plans and let the vines get a little waterstressed, realizing early on
Grains go local
that the lighter crop might offer up some extra intense flavors. “Compared to recent years, this was a really difficult crop,” said Brad Petersen, vineyard manager for Silver Oak and Twomey. “It wasn’t as bad as 2010 or 2011 but we had really strange bloom weather and the vines didn’t know what to do. Thankfully, we had a really stretched-out harvest so we were never really pushed, and most of the sugars got to where we wanted them to be.” Nobody, except maybe
Cold spring a decisive factor
by Holly Fox Correspondent
by Stuart Tiffen Staff Writer
When customers enter Noble Folk Ice Cream and Pie Bar on the Healdsburg Plaza they might notice the unusual ice cream flavors. Think blackberry rosemary, Japanese purple yam and cardamom, with some flavor inspirations coming from Asia and Scandinavia. But the pies lined up next to the ice cream case might have an even more revolutionary ingredient: flour milled from heirloom grains, grown just minutes away. Noble Folk was opened by Christian Sullberg and Osvaldo Jimenez in 2014, four years after opening their popular bakery, Moustache Baked Goods. When they learned that Front Porch Farm, a small farm off Rio Lindo Avenue tucked in a sunny valley to the east of Fitch Mountain, was growing several kinds of heirloom grains, they got to work experimenting with flour from these grains for their pie crusts. “Once you start working with these things, you notice a huge difference,” Sullberg says. “I think it makes our crusts really good and it
The drought has been a major topic for several years. Governor Edmund G. Brown declared a State of Emergency in January, prompting municipal restrictions on water use. For the first time since 1977, wine industry professionals have been making wine under official drought conditions. While its effects have been seen in this harvest, winemakers remain optimistic in the quality of the 2015 vintage. “This is the first year that we’ve felt the effects of the drought significantly on the fruit that’s coming in,” Cartograph Wines winemaker Alan Baker said. Throughout the winegrowing area, the harvest is significantly reduced from years past. Vineyards are reporting shortfalls of anywhere from 20 to 50 percent and even higher. Baker, who pulls in grapes from Mendocino as well as the Russian River Valley, said the condition has been widespread, but pointed out that the drought wasn’t the only fac-
Photo provided
HARVESTING WHEAT — Locally grown wheat is harvested at Front Porch farm outside Healdsburg.
2010 by Mimi and Peter Buckley. He says no small farmer in the area would choose to grow grains purely for financial reasons, but that there are rewards. Diversity is one of them. Growing heirloom grain varieties alongside other fruits
VINTAGE continues on page 2
Lower grape yields due to more than just drought
A thriving local ‘grain shed’ supports diversity
makes it a little different than other pies.” And the customers? “They love it,” Sullberg says. “They’re definitely down with the grain.” Johnny Wilson is the general manager at Front Porch Farm, which was started in
Mother Nature, planned it this way, but the surplus of the past two years should now find increased buyer interest, with fewer tons coming off the vineyards this year. “The vines might have been tired this year,” said Linegar and were definitely impacted from four years of drought. “When it’s all said and done, we might see a harvest that gets back to our 10 year average of 3.5 tons per acre.” By comparison, 2014’s crop of 255,635 tons topped out at 4.39 tons per acre. That crop was worth $593 million, just slightly behind the biggest year ever in 2013 at $605 million. “This year was really tough,” Barry Hoffner of Silverwood Ranch in Cloverdale said. “We were 50 percent below last year and, I’d say, probably 40 percet below our average over the last 10 years. The lighter crop produced brighter sugars. Our biggest problem came during bloom. It was like the vines got stuck.” In a distant part of the county in Green Valley, west of the Russian River, grower Pamela Gunsalus saw the same big drop in yields. “There was some varation between the different varietals but we were down about 40 percent,” she said. Cluster shatter was prominent in some of her blocks, said Gunsalus, due to unruly weather right after bud break
and vegetables is another step away from monoculture, he says. “Everything is milled, harvested, handled locally so if you’re going to buy it,” he says, “it would be supporting GRAINS continues on page 6
tor in the smaller winegrape haul. “Across the board we’re seeing 20-40 percent lower yields out of vineyards, because the drought combined with an early start and really long bloom cycle because it cooled off, so the fruit wasn’t huge,” he said. “The number of clusters was about what we’d expect, but everything ended up weighing out a couple hundred pounds lighter.” Many experts are pointing to the cold spring as a major factor in the results of the harvest. Nick Frey, formerly president of the Winegrape Commission, was pouring for Balletto Winery at the Sonoma County Harvest Fair. “May of this year was colder than January,” Frey said. This caused vineyard conditions known as shatter, he added, referring to coulure, a condition when flowering vines don’t receive enough sunlight, and temperatures are lower than optimal. Shatter typically leads to lower yields in wine grapes. Tony Bugica of Bacchus YIELDS continues on page 13