Book Review: Napa The Story of an American Eden

In February, we visited Kelly and Bob Foley of Robert Foley Vineyards on Howell Mountain. We got there in the pouring rain but inside the tasting room, Kelly and Bob welcomed us warmly. We spent one hour telling stories and there were many! Bob was telling us about his love of Charbono after tasting an Inglenook Charbono in his formative years. He went to U.C. Davis and got a degree in Enology and Viticulture. Somehow Robert Mondavi's name came up and Bob told us that he went to school with one of the Mondavis and at that time they pronounced their name "Mon-day-vi". It was only after Robert Mondavi began his winery that Robert began to pronounce the family name "Mon-dah-vi".
After our trip to Napa, I decided that I needed to read more about Napa. Full disclosure, I have read Napa The Story of an American Eden once before and wrote about it, but in light of our recent trip to Napa, where we visited Bob and Kelly, I thought that it would be good to refresh myself by reading James Conoway's book again.
My first review was a general overview of the book. Since James Conoway begins by recounting how Jack and Jamie Davis were looking for a property to buy in Napa and then flashes back to some of the history, the read can be a little disorienting. I thought I would try to put some kind of chronology on the book by highlighting what I thought were some interesting facts about Napa.
Interesting tidbits from the book:

• Napa means grizzly, or harpoon point, or fish, or bounteous place
• George Calvert Yount, a trapper from North Carolina and the first white settler in Napa Valley, planted Mission vines bought from General Mariano Vallejo in Sonoma in 1838
• Agoston Haraszthy was a Balkan immigrant who started a winery in Sonoma, called Buena Vista, in 1856
• Wine was made commercially in Napa in 1858 by John Patchett
• Prussian immigrant and freethinker, Charles Krug, made wine in Napa three years after Patchett
• Beringer brothers from Germany, worked for Krug and in the late 1870s constructed their winery, tunneled into the mountain, and eventually built an elaborate seventeen-room mansion called the Rhine House
• Gustave Niebaum, a Finnish sea captain created an architectural wonder called Inglenook; Inglenook's first harvest was in 1882, Inglenook was one of the first wineries to put “Napa Valley” on its labels; Inglenook’s practice of vintage dating was also uncommon
• Hamilton Crabb as the owner of the To Kalon vineyard in Oakville
• J. Leland Stewart was the owner of Souverain Cellars on Howell Mountain
• Beaulieu Vineyard was owned by Georges de Latour and their enologist was André Tchelistcheff, in 1951 they hired Joe Heitz as assistant winemaker for $325 a month
• Tom (a du Pont) and his wife Martha May bought a vineyard from the Rhodeses and named it Martha’s Vineyard, in honor of his wife. Martha’s Vineyard produced some fine Napa Valley Cabernet grapes, which were sold to Joe Heitz

I was interested in reading about Joe Heitz because Bob said that he spent one year learning about vineyard and winery work from Joe. In reading the book, I also learned that Robert Mondavi did indeed change the pronunciation of his name to "Mon-dah-vi". There were many other interesting factoids in the book which I am thinking of summarizing in a future post.

2022 Sokol Blosser Dundee Hills Pinot Noir

Our son paid us a visit this past weekend so that he could get together with his friends and have a play date for his daughter, our 4 year old grand daughter. We met up for dinner which was moussaka, Greek salad and a nice Tuscan boule bread. Typically, when we have a Greek meal, our drink of choice is ouzo, which brings back wonderful memories of sunny Santorini. However, this evening, our son anted up a 2022 Sokol Blosser Dundee Hills Pinot Noir. I have to say, it went very well with the meal. The Pinot Noir was nice and smooth on the finish and tasted like a mature wine.

I wanted to find out more about this wine and looked on the internet and on the Sokol Blosser website was everything I wanted to know!
Here is the vintage notes from the 2022 Dundee Hills Pinot Noir:
What started as a dry winter turned into a deluge of rain in the springtime. We had the wettest and coldest April/May/June in recorded (130 years) history. Freezing temperatures on the morning of April 14th and 15th knocked back the fragile new growth and we thought our crop yields would be down by 50-60%. In over 51 years of growing grapes here in the Dundee Hills we have never seen a freezing event during the growing season, so we had no idea what was going to happen. The primary buds froze and died, but the secondary buds came on, produced fewer but larger clusters, and the vines made a miraculous comeback. We had the 2nd warmest and driest summer on record, and then we got to October. Everything depended on good ripening conditions in the month of October since bloom was much later. Fortunately we got the warmest October in Oregon history, we were able to let the grapes hang, and the rains stayed put until all our Estate fruit was in on Thursday, October 27th. The fruit got nice and ripe, and we are thrilled with the wine produced from this vintage!
As a grape grower, I really appreciated the vintage notes.
References:
1. Estate Pinot Noir Dundee Hills, Willamette Valley, Oregon 2022.

Streamlining Pruning Tasks in the Vineyard

It's taken many seasons and each year, we try to streamline our spring pruning duties in the vineyard. We begin by cutting the tops of last year's shoots which are now hardened canes. In the beginning, we would just throw the cuttings in the middle of the row and then come back to gather them up and take it out of the vineyard using a tarp. After a few years, we began piling the cuttings at each linepost to give us a visual guide as to where the cuttings were. This actually speeded up the process and then the big breakthrough came when my husband procured a sled from Alaska to remove the cuttings from each row.
This is a picture from last year where our friend Barry came to help my husband with the removal of all the cuttings.

Another thing that we implimented last year was to lower all of the nets to the lowest notch on our lineposts. Every year, we always talked about how we should be lowering our nets to make work easier for us during the growing season before we have to deploy our nets. The stumbling block was always "how would we secure the nets". The way we secured the nets had to be easy, preferrably not involving any cutting which might inadvertantly damage the netting. After much brain storming, we came up with velcro and that has made all the difference!

At the end of harvest last year we lowered the nets and velcroed the netting to each line post, which gave us a leg up on our pruning tasks this spring.
The first thing we did this spring was to remove all of the Agfast, the little black ties, shown circled in red in the picture above, that we put into the trellis to prevent the new shoots from growing into each other and to allow for airflow. In the past, it took an entire month to remove the Agfast, but with the nets in the low position, it made it possible to see where all those little black ties were and this year, it took us only 15 days to remove all the Agfast.
The next improvement in our method was the realization that we could cut last year's fruiting cane from this year's potential fruiting cane while leaving it still attached to the trellis. This pre-cut puts all of the energy of growth into the few remaining shoots!

The images above show our workflow. First, cut the tops off last year's growth, pile the cuttings at the linepost and then make a pre-pruning cut indicating what we will remove from the vineyard, leaving what we will use as this year's fruiting canes. We feel that this pre-pruning is important because as the vines begin to wake up, all of the energy of growth will go into the few canes that we have left. At the moment, 20 out of the 36 rows of vines have had this pre-pruning cut made.
After 13 years, we are feeling like we are finally getting the hang of being grape farmers!

Spring Sighting in the Vineyard

We are in the vineyard, doing our first prunings. While I am focussed on just pruning, my husband is pruning as well as watching out for interesting and unusual things in the vineyard. A few days ago, while we were working together, he came across the first ladybugs in our vineyard. The ladybug looked a little weird and was moving quite slowly. It had some yellow stuff on it's wings. Although it looked like pollen, when we took some close up shots of the ladybug, the yellow stuff looked like this:

At home, we learned that this lady bug was infected with the Hesperomyces virescens fungus and what we were seeing was the yellow fruiting bodies of the fungus. I came upon an excellent and freely available article called "Integrative taxonomy reveals hidden species within a common fungal parasite of ladybirds", that contained a very magnified view of the fungus:¹

This illustration shows that what we perceived as pollen were groups of the fungal thalli. The illustration on the left shows a single thallus in all it's magnified glory!
We speculate that these ladybugs overwintered in a sheltered place and were out in the spring weather. When and where they became infected with the fungus is a mystery but now we know that the yellow stuff on the ladybugs are fungi!
References:
1. Haelewaters, D., De Kesel, A. & Pfister, D.H., Integrative taxonomy reveals hidden species within a common fungal parasite of ladybirds, Sci Rep 8, 15966 (2018).