Heat Wave and our Vineyard Stewards
Right now the song in my head is the 1963 Holland-Dozier-Holland classic, “Heat Wave.” Not so much because of the lyric, as because it has just been freakin’ hot. As an aside, if you don’t know Holland-Dozier-Holland (or for that matter the Funk Brothers) stop reading immediately and fill that gap in your musical education. Originally recorded by and a hit for Martha and the Vandellas, it has been covered dozens of times, including the 1975 hit version by Linda Ronstadt. On to more vineyardy (sic) things, it’s been in the mid-90’s for a few days now and is expected to hit 96 today as I write this (July 5th). The berries are at perhaps their best stage to weather heat spikes. We’ve done a light leaf pulling on the East side and still have plenty of protection.
Our biggest concern is for the vineyard stewards who work in our vineyards. It can be dangerous to work in these conditions and you’ll see us and our on-site supervisors being highly attentive to hydration levels, making sure the crews are taking breaks in the shade, and calling early quit times when temperatures rise above a certain level.
You can imagine what it is like to work in these conditions. We are extremely grateful for their dedication and are happy to see that it is going to cool down a bit for the next week. Their work is hard enough without the extreme heat. More later…
My Summertime obsession is checking the app that allows me to see how much solar energy is being produced by the solar panels on the tasting room roof at Winderlea. In reality, it’s just for the 22 kW we installed in 2021. The original 13 kW don’t have an app. This May, the new panels produced 2.09 MWh, the most ever for the month of May. As you might imagine, this has implications for the growing season, and as it turns out, according to Greg Jones, Ph.d, our heat units accumulation is higher than it was at this time in 2015, our most recent warm year (and along with 2014 one of the 2 warmest in history). Greg is a very highly regarded climatologist and you can see his vintage report 
Long time followers know that Donna and I first learned about ¡Salud! during our early trips to Oregon in 2005 to look for a vineyard. We were so impressed that the founders of the Oregon Wine Industry, led by Nancy and Dick Ponzi, found a way to provide healthcare services to Oregon’s vineyard stewards and their families while they were here in the valley. Many vineyard stewards aren’t in one place or with one employer long enough to qualify for healthcare. ¡Salud! through its auction and other fundraising activities raises over a million dollars each year which is multiplied many times over with pro bono services donated by the medical community. If you’d like to contribute to this cause and add some beautiful wine to your cellar at the same time, your first opportunity will be the ¡Salud! Summertime E-Auction which is July 11-13. You can bid online here. Donna and I have many cases of wine we’ve purchased at ¡Salud! in our cellar and it’s always a special treat to open one. We hope you’ll join us. More later…
So, not that long ago I wrote that with bud break delayed as it was, we were expecting bloom (flowering) to be delayed for a few weeks as well. With all this lovely sunshine we’ve been receiving, though, we seem to have caught up and bloom looks like it will occur in the next couple of weeks. This timing is more typical and means that we could be looking at the start of harvest in September when we would normally expect it. That said, there’s a lot of runway before that plane takes off and a few weeks of cool and cloudy weather could change everything. Just one of the many joys of growing wine grapes. More later…
It’s Bloom! Despite our earlier handwringing, bloom is pretty much on schedule now. We called 50% bloom at Winderlea on June 10th and at Worden Hill Vineyard on June 12th. Depending on your winemaking style, harvest will begin from 100 to 110 days later. We’re usually about 100 days because we like higher acidity and somewhat less ripening. The fruit for our sparkling wine may be picked even earlier so that we have high acidity, lower aroma and flavor compounds, and lower sugar (which converts to alcohol). So, where does that put us for our still wines? Well, at 100 days, we would expect to start picking Winderlea Vineyard on about September 18th and Worden Hill Vineyard on about September 20th. This is just about typical. Our very first harvest in 2006 started on September 23rd. As always, a lot can happen in a hundred days but for now, things are shaping up nicely. More later…
Weather, what can you do? When I was growing up in New England we were very fond of quoting Mark Twain, who allegedly said (it’s very hard to find attribution, though Twain did talk about New England weather frequently.), “If you don’t like the weather in New England now, just wait a minute.” That quote seems to be fair game in many places and, to be honest, I’ve had it quoted to me by the residents of just about every place I’ve lived. Our current climate in Oregon seems to be a fair contender for the moment, as we’ve gone from cool and wet, to very warm and dry (perhaps the driest May ever), to quite cold with a bit of rain (and even some hail at Winderlea yesterday) for the past few days. The grapevines seem to be responding well enough, though personally, I’d like to get the flannel out of my closet and into a storage box for the Summer. As I write this it is 65 and partly sunny and that seems pretty good to me, being fair skinned and all. I’d be OK with this for a while but who knows. In the meantime, I’ll just wait a minute. More later…
A few weeks ago our sheep, now 80+ in number, invited some friends to live with them. Well, I call them friends, but they are protectors, muscle, bodyguards, you get it. Their names are Nymeria and Ghost and they are Great Pyrenees / Maremma cross. They seem adorable and they are quite playful, with each other and with human visitors, but let’s face it, they have a job to do. They know it and we know it. Across the fence from our sheep and their unwitting lambs, lurk coyotes (and perhaps other predators) licking their chops at the prospect of lamb dinner. Nymeria and Ghost will have none of that. They patrol the fence line marking their territory and, if all works according to plan, keeping predators at bay. My one concern is, have we unleashed a war of escalation? Will the coyotes bring in even bigger muscle? If they do, how will the sheep respond. Will the skirmish cross the border in to our neighbors’ properties? With any luck the coyotes will stand down and content themselves with gophers and squirrels. But as you know from watching cartoons, coyotes are nothing if not persistent. The worry continues.
Monday, May 29th is Memorial Day. Originally known as Decoration Day, it is the day we honor those who have given their lives in military service. Decreed by General John A Logan in 1868, the original May 30th date was believed to have been chosen because no Civil War battle fell on the date. Logan wanted a day to commemorate fallen soldiers and to decorate their graves and cemeteries. I cannot think of a person I knew who died in battle, but many in my family served and each year we marked this day with the somber reverence it deserves. The traditions of this holiday have evolved over time. One that I particularly like is the emergence of the red poppy as the symbol of Memorial Day. Here is a short 
By way of our friends and neighbors at 
OK, it’s more than a little early to be forecasting the vintage at this juncture but we’re already thinking about it. Our bud break was April 29 – May 1 so that will put flowering at about the 4th of July. The weather should be pretty nice then and oftentimes that means we will have a very fruitful year. If you look at the vineyard now, we have pretty uniform shoot sizes so the duration of bloom should be pretty compact. All in all, things are in a good direction for yields. Many of the decisions we make require pretty long lead times (and cost money). If we made a thousand cases more than usual ($$ out) how long would it take us to sell it? Would it throw off the release of the following vintage? Or, could we find buyers for the fruit we don’t want to make in to wine ($$ in)? How much work will that be and if all growers are in the same position, how much will spot market fruit prices drop? Our fruit is held in pretty high regard, but this would be a one time sale, not a long term contract. Or we could just drop the excess fruit on the ground and aim for our target yields. That’s more neutral from a business plan perspective but perhaps a missed opportunity. So there you have it; a glimpse in to the mind of a wine grower. Stay tuned to see how the vintage plays out. More later…