Wine Country Weathers Storm

Looking at the swollen Russian River hit 48 feet and cover a spillway, seeing many vineyards completely below water and hearing of flooded homes, it’s hard not to think that wineries faced disaster in the rainstorms that hit Napa, Sonoma and Santa Barbara counties the last two weeks.

But that’s not the case.

“Grapevines are pretty hardy,” says Bob Steinhauer, viticulturist for Wine World, which farms 3,500 acres of vines in Napa, Sonoma and Santa Barbara counties. “I don’t think we’ll see any serious impact from the rains.”

Steinhauer says that when vines are dormant, as they were last week, little can hurt them, save for flash floods that actually tear out vines. Other than the nuisance and the cost of cleanup later, floods at this time of the year pose little problems for most growers.

Most winemakers recall the even worse flooding that hit Napa and Sonoma in 1986, when news stories predicted disaster. Six months later, most reporters weren’t around to see one of the best harvests on record in both regions, both in terms of quality and quantity.

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According to Dirk Hampson, winemaker at Far Niente Winery, “Napa dodged a hell of a bullet. If it had rained hard for another six to eight hours (on Jan. 10), we might have had real trouble. As it was, the water rose but it wasn’t nearly as bad as ’86.”

Even in areas where the rainfall was worse than in 1986, such as Schellville in southern Sonoma County, no long-term damage is expected.

“We still have some vineyards under water,” says Angelo Sangiocomo, one of the largest growers in the Carneros region. “But we’ve had that happen before and we don’t anticipate any damage from it.”

Steinhauer says one concern is debris from fallen oak trees. Oaks infected with oak root fungus could, if left in a vineyard, transmit that disease to vines. Steinhauer says he would have crews cleaning up vineyards on the first dry day.

He estimates the recovery cost at about $75,000 to clear his 2,600 acres of Napa and Sonoma vines, but some of that cost might be part of normal maintenance.

Far Niente has the valley’s most extensive barrel-aging caves, dug into a hillside, but they remained dry. And, Hampson says, most vineyards that need underground drainage systems have them, and that provided insurance against disaster.

“Our drainage system and all the culverts were pushed to the max, but they handled all the water and there was no severe erosion,” he says. “A few small oak trees fell over, but that’s about as minor as it can get, given the severity of the storm.”

Erosion is always a worry in weather like this, but only newly planted vineyards were at risk.

“We’re a little concerned about our new plantings on terraces,” says Jim Clendenen, winemaker at Au Bon Climat in Santa Barbara County, also hard-hit by the storm. “We took away all the ground cover when we planted five acres of Barbera on a steep slope, and without a crop cover, there’s the danger of losing vines due to erosion.”

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Otherwise, he says, most of the vineyards in the area were spared damage.

“We’re in a blessed microclimate,” he says. “The night (Jan. 11) that (the city of) Santa Barbara got five inches overnight, Santa Maria got only two inches.”

Fears that flooding might spread phylloxera were quashed by most growers, who say the only vines that remain susceptible to the root louse are probably infected already. The remainder of vines are growing on resistant roots.

In fact, some vineyard managers say the flooding actually may slow down the phylloxera for a year or two, the way it did in the 1880s, when the pest attacked Bordeaux and the vineyards were intentionally flooded to retard phylloxera growth.

Fears that trellising systems could be destroyed are pooh-poohed by Hampson: “In ‘86, we had trellises go over, so we stood ‘em back up and away they (the vines) went.”

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As for fears that the floods could accelerate the spread of weed seed, some growers actually are pleased to hear that.

“We like cover crops,” says Clendenen. “We want the weeds between the rows as competition for the (vine) roots, to suck up extra moisture.”

The worst area of flooding was the Russian River in western Sonoma County. Erich Russell, owner/winemaker at Rabbit Ridge Vineyards, lives right off River Road, site of the worst damage.

“The vines of my neighbor, Gary Mills, were under 30 feet of water, and I couldn’t get out on the road,” says Russell, “but floods like this aren’t a major problem, just inconvenient. When the water recedes, you have to go through the vineyard and pick up all that debris--garbage cans, logs, trash.

“It was worse back in ’86. Then our back pond overflowed the dam and the road. This year we got within a foot of that happening. In ‘86, we had 14 inches of rain in two days. This year it was relatively spread out, just a steady rain, so this is a blessing. For all us guys with hillside vineyards who had our water table eroded away by the (six) years of drought, this is great.”