Wonderful Article---Four Kingdoms And A Place: Committing to Wines of Terroir

A few weeks ago, my husband sent me a link to Meg Houston Maker's article Four Kingdoms And A Place: Committing To Wine Of Terroir. First of all, it is such an intriguing title and I think that "Four Kingdoms and a Place" sounds like a great brand name. So Meg had me with the title!
Many people have tried to define the French concept of terroir. I think Meg defines terroir in a truly holistic manner and dispels the concept of "natural wine".
I loved the article so much, I left a comment on her site asking if I could quote passages from her article and she graciously gave me her okay! The entire article is wonderful to read, so I encourage you to click on the link above, but here is what I especially liked in Meg's words:
Winemaking requires human intervention. This is why I find the term “natural wine” so misguided and misleading. Wine isn’t “natural.” Wine demands physical and mental human labor.
What do you plant, and where do you plant it? How do you farm it — organically, biodynamically, according to la lutte raisonnée? Or do you spray it to within an inch of its life? How do you decide when to pick, how to vinify, how to age and bottle your precious harvest? How do you decide what will be in bounds, and what will be out of bounds, during the infinitude of decisions along the way?
What would a farmstead wine look like? A wine made from grapes grown in the producer’s own vineyard, with no purchased fruit. A wine made following old-school winemaking, with little tinkering in the cantina, no monkey business to modulate acidity and sweetness, no designer yeast. While we’re at it, let’s not mask the wine with heavy-handed élevage. When the winemaker overthinks or overworks the wine, her voice and her ideas start to drown out the land’s.
Balance is key: A person grows and makes the wine, but vines and microbes, rocks and sunlight, should also have something to say. Wine, like cheese, relies on the neighborly cooperation of animals, plants, microbes, and site.
This is why I like to say that a wine of terroir requires Four Kingdoms and a Place: Animalia, Plantae, Fungi, Bacteria — and, of course, the vineyard.
It is a hero’s journey, the stuff of true drama. When it works, the wine is wonderful. In fact, the wine has to be wonderful. It has to be delicious if the winery is to succeed. But the winemaker is a critical part of the wine’s story; without her there would be no wine, and certainly no wine of terroir.

Credits:
Meg Houston Maker: Four Kingdoms And A Place: Committing To Wine Of Terroir.

Taking Brix Measurements for Our Auxerrois

Recently, my husband was on his tractor and spraying. This is the best time to assess the overall health of the vines and the grapes. While he was in the Auxerrois row, he saw that the grapes were changing color from green to yellow green. This is a sign of ripening or véraison. Last year, with the few Auxerrois grapes that we had, I did take more data points on the progress of the ripening which began on August 16th with a Brix reading of 9. It took two weeks for the Brix to increase from 9 to 13, by August 31. From August 31 to September 15th, the Brix stayed constant, reading 15. There seemed to be a plateau that the sugar level had reached. We harvested the Auxerrois on September 21, when the Brix reading was at 17.
We have a few more grapes this year so we can take more readings with a bit more accuracy. But, as of August 19, our Auxerrois Brix are reading 13.
This is highly unexpected, given that budbreak for the Auxerrois this year was on May 7. Our data point from last year seems to suggests that harvest date is approximately 144 days post budbreak, which when applied to this year would be September 28. One thing is true, it's time to start netting!

What is SOLA?

People sometimes ask us if we are organic or sustainable and we have tended to shy away from defining our vineyard and wine with labels. This morning, I was reading an article on wine categories, I came upon this acronym: SOLA---what is it? Short for [sustainable, organic, lower alcohol] opportunity index. This index is a multi-category assessment of the alternative wine sector. I did not know that.
I used to think that sustainable was a really squishy label, but in 2014, Sonoma County Winegrowers announced it's goal to become America's first 100% certified sustainable wine growing region by 2019. These growers must complete a self-assessment of 138 best practices and have an independent third party audit.
Some of these 138 best practices include land use, canopy management, energy efficiency, water quality assessment, carbon emissions, healthcare and training for employees and being a good neighbor and community member.
The article then went on to define the various categories of wines and how they are defined:¹

Category	Definition
Organic Wine	Produced from grapes that have been grown organically, often without the use of pesticides and other synthetic materials and where the winemaking methods employed adhere to the rules and regulations of an organic certifying body. Precise definitions vary from market to market.
Biodynamic Wine	An extended version of organic wine, first developed by Rudolph Steiner in the 1920s stimulating the health of the vine by homeopathic means so as to avoid disease. Applications follow the lunar calendar.
Natural Wine	Farmed organically and made without adding or removing anything in the cellar (or use of processing aids, heavy manipulation, etc.) creates a "living wine".
Orange and Skin Contact Wine	White wines made in the same way as red wines; skins are left on and the wine is left to ferment often resulting in an orange hue.
Vegan Wine	Made without interaction from animal products (conventional wines may use fining agents such as isinglass and casein).
Sustainably Produced Wine	Generally considered to be produced in an environmentally-free manner (such as at a carbon-neutral winery or water and energy efficiency) or using grapes which have been grown with minimum chemical input and an effort to maintain the quality of the land. But there is no consistent definition.
Environmentally-friendly Wine	No definition or certification but centers around the concept of 'green' products.
Fairtrade Wine	Products certified by Fairtrade International, an organization that promotes products that meet social, economic, and environmental standards set by the foundation, including protection of workers' rights and the environment.
Sulphite-free Wine	The legal definition for sulphite-free wine under both EU and USA law is a wine containing no more than 10 parts per million total sulphites and 5 parts per million free sulphites. Wine with an excess of 10 mg/L must state "it contains sulphites" on the label. All wines contain some level of sulphites, as sulfur is a natural by-product of fermentation.
Preservative-free Wine	Typically refers to no added sulphites.

Who knew there were so many categories of wine? We don't really fit nicely into any category.
References:
1. Rachel Arthur, Organic, natural, biodynamic...What Next for Wine?, Beveragedaily.com, August 8, 2018.

Canopy Management: Achieving the Proper Microclimate

Today, I am reading The Role of Canopy Management in Vine Balance and came across this:
The goal of vineyard production is to achieve vine balance where adequate canopy size and sunlight exposure result in more favorable and sustainable vine growth and fruit quality requiring fewer direct canopy management methods during the growing season.¹
I'm all for this because we seem to be spending all our days in the vineyard engaged in the task of canopy management. We are doing this because we know that in order to get the best quality grapes, there are certain practices that we need to follow to achieve optimum air flow and sunlight exposure. When we do these tasks such as shoot positioning and leaf pulling, we affect the microclimate of the main canopy and the fruit zone.
Important growth responses influenced by microclimate.

Growth Response
Fueling the canopy	• outer layer of leaves is the most efficient in using sunlight to produce carbohydrates via photosynthesis • 94% of the sunlight is absorbed or reflected from the outer surface/leaves of the vine canopy •leaves in the inner canopy become net users of nutrients rather than producers of more carbohydrates
Developing buds and fruit for next year	• buds for growth next year are initiated in late spring and early summer on shoots grown in the current season • adequate sunlight exposure of shoots is critical to obtain sufficient floral initiation for achieving fruitfulness of shoots in the next season • conversely, buds that develop on shoots in dense canopies with low light exposure have fewer inflorescences (flower clusters) per shoot than those canopies that are better exposed
Reducing disease	• a less dense canopy allows for increased air flow, faster drying of leaves, and improved spray penetration • a properly maintained canopy is less conducive to disease infection and outbreaks, and they also improve the efficacy of spray applications
Enhancing fruit quality	• in highly vigorous vineyards with dense canopies, fruit can have high pH and unripe flavors caused by compounds in the berries (i.e. methoxypyrazines or C6 alcohols such as hexanol) • canopies with open fruit zones and well exposed fruit can result in higher sugars, color (anthocyanins), and positive aroma and flavor compounds such as norisoprenoids and terpenes

It takes a long time to do canopy management by hand. In thick over grown canopies, we have some of those, one of our 800 feet rows can take 7 hours per person, usually with 2 people working, so a total of 14 man/woman hours. Given this reality, and the fact that we would always like to produce quality fruit, we are trying to think of solutions to ameliorate this situation for next year.
Here is what we have come up with:

• We are Rethinking Our Vineyard Trellis. If we raise our fruiting wire, the distance between the fruiting wire and the first catchwire is only 8 inches. We feel that in the first growth spurt after budbreak, our vines will more likely be able to reach the first catch wires at 8 inches and stay within the catch wire boundaries as they grow.
• During the first grand growth phase after budbreak, we feel that we must keep an eye on the amount of rain the young shoots are seeing. We want the internode distance to be of sufficient spacing so we will have our irrigation system on stand by if lack of rain during this time becomes an issue.

References:
1. Amanda J. Vance, Alison L. Reeve and Patricia A. Skinkis, The Role of Canopy Management in Vine Balance, EM 9071, June 2013.

Modified Eichhorn-Lorenz Grape Vine Phenology

Our friend and his daughter came to help us in the vineyard and we were doing leaf pulling and shoot positioning. Our friend's daughter worked with us in June to do leaf pulling and shoot positioning so this might have seemed like a task that is never over. I asked them if they knew the Greek myth of Sisyphus who was condemned to roll a stone up a mountain only to have it fall back down such that he had to roll the stone up the mountain every day. That is what leaf pulling and shoot positioning is like.
My husband and I recapped what we did this year to try to figure out if there is a more efficient way of doing what seems to be a perpetual shoot positioning, canopy management Sisyphean task.
Well, in the March 2018 issue of Wines & Vines there is an excellent and instructive article on the modified Eichhorn-Lorenz system, Grapevine Phenology Revisited, written by Fritz Westover detailing when the best times are for certain tasks.
Fritz's advice: collecting data about important phenology benchmarks (bud burst, shoots reaching 10 cm, flowering begins, flowering, setting, berries pea size, véraison and harvest) can help make better decisions in the vineyard throughout the growing season.
So, what is the Definition of Phenology:Phenology is the study of natural changes or growth and natural development of an organism and its relation to seasonal changes in climate.¹
The article provided a detailed breakdown of the major grape vine phenological events and coupled it with implementation of vineyard-management tasks including canopy management, vineyard nutrient monitoring and pest and disease prevention.¹

Phenological Stage	Vineyard Task
Shoot and Inflorescence Development	•Begin a protective fungicide program when shoots are just 2 inches long •Unwanted “sucker” shoots can easily be removed from trunks and non-count shoots from cordons or fruiting canes
Flowering	•Sample leaf tissue for nutrient analysis and start to introduce systemic fungicides into their spray programs Greatest window of disease susceptibility is from the period beginning two weeks before bloom and extending four weeks past fruit set •During this time, use the best products and canopy-management practices for preventing fungal diseases on the fruit and the canopy
Berry Formation	•Greatest window of disease susceptibility is from the period beginning two weeks before bloom and extending four weeks past fruit set •During this time, use the best products and canopy-management practices for preventing fungal diseases on the fruit and the canopy •A fungicide with a long pre-harvest interval (PHI), such as mancozeb (with a PHI of 66 days), must be taken out of a spray program based not on calendar date, but on a phenological indicator
Berry Ripening	•Second opportunity to sample leaf tissue for nutrient status and can begin to finalize crop estimates for the winery
Senescence

After spending yet another sweltering day in the vineyard, I have to ask, is canopy management a summer long activity? Answer: it is if you want happy vines yielding happy fruit.
References:
1. Fritz Westover, Grapevine Phenology Revisited, Wines & Vines, March 2018.