NEWS FROM THE VINEYARD
Eisele Vineyard comes alive for a new vintage…
After a trying year on many levels,
the vines awaken in Napa
by Raj Vaidya
Wednesday April 21, 2021
2020 was a trying year for most, but the vine growers and producers of the Napa Valley and much of California had it worse than many others on account of the devastating fires centered around harvest time. The Glass Fire which ravaged both mountain ranges and much of the valley floor in Napa threatened lives, burned down many people’s homes and severely damaged all fruit that was still on the vines with smoke taint, a flaw which is both difficult to identify when the musts and wines are young and nearly impossible to treat after the fact.
The winter season of 2020/2021 did not produce ample rainfall in Napa or the high Sierra mountains but nonetheless the producers I visited last week were optimistic for a strong season, assuming they have relief from more fires. The vines have just begun awakening, with bud break happening fairly early thanks to a warm spell in early April. A few nice things I came to note while visiting…
Historically Napa has not been an epicenter of organic or sustainable farming, but today more and more top estates are embracing the ethos. A lot more cover crops appear to be in use than during my last visit, and it’s become downright rare to see brown, dead earth in the overall landscape (a sign of herbicides.)
Many producers are moving towards dry farming, with less and less systemic drip irrigation in place, and where it is in place it is used very sparingly. A good sign for a state which has been in drought conditions for about 20 years.
And sad though it was, the fact that the fires were so widespread means that many of the hillsides of Napa are now safe from fires for the moment and the near future. These fires were devastating, but this part of California has long had instances of such phenomena naturally, with most of them starting during electrical storms. Typically a forest will regenerate over a period of 25 years, and even though dry grasses will appear every season, because there isn’t the huge mass of wood as a source to burn for the near future, the fires in Napa will be easier to contain and less impactful to the farming community in the years to come.
Something about the rebirth of spring naturally makes one feel positive about the future. This photo of the historic Eisele Vineyard (see my What’s Pressoir Drinking this week to learn more about this estate) shows the beginnings of bud break on a 30 year old vine of Cabernet Sauvignon in their ‘Grand Vin’ section of old vines. You can see that they have mowed the cover crops (so as to preserve water for the vines) but kept some cover amongst the rows to maintain a presence of fauna diversity. The irrigation lines you see are almost never used now, in fact they were only used last year during the fires to keep the ground cover wet so it did not burn. The winery needed almost all of their water reservoir to fight the fires coming down the mountain, so it’s a good thing the vines have been trained towards dry farming for some years. They have already done some debudding here on this vine, managing how the canopy will grow, but with rising numbers in average temperatures and warm days, they are debudding less than in the past, so as to keep more canopy to shade the grapes from the warm summer sun. Just the beginnings of signs of life, but they certainly put a smile on my face to match those of the vineyard workers who were showing me around last week!
