And the Rains Came

After 20 years of wine writing, I have yet to learn one important lesson: Never write a harvest report. Whatever you say, no matter how assiduously researched or carefully worded, will be wrong.

This latest harvest is a stellar example. I forayed to Napa Valley to get a feel for the harvest there. It’s been a tricky year, what with the mother of all El Nin~os apparently acting up, a prolonged dry spell--drought, really--and then episodic rains. What’s more, after three consecutive small crops, the ’97 vintage loomed as the largest in recent years.

Grape growers come in only two flavors: morose or insistently optimistic. And keep in mind that harvest gives new meaning to the word “stress.” Few of us have jobs in which everything we’ve worked for all year long comes down to one make-or-break moment.

So the grape growers protect themselves in one of two ways. The optimists haul out that maternal mantra, “Everything will look better in the morning.” Darker sorts assume that everything will be awful, as always. This way, they figure, they’ll be pleasantly surprised if it doesn’t turn out so bad after all.

In any case, like the proverbial blind men feeling different parts of the elephant, winemakers know only their own vineyards. Take Robert Brittan, winemaker at Napa Valley’s Stags’ Leap Winery.

“We’ve had this absolutely killer ripening period,” he declares. “We’ve got a lot of raisining and very small berries in the Cabernet. Yet it’s a big crop. The Cabernet has high sugars and low pH.” More often, big crops have large juice-engorged berries in which the sugar and acid numbers are not quite so ideal.

But in a different part of Napa Valley, high up Howell Mountain, winegrower Randy Dunn of Dunn Vineyards says of the large harvest: “The cluster count is the same, but the berries are big.” He, too, noted good acidity and sugars. But that was before the rain.

Will the rain matter? Well, it depends. The first rainfall, on Aug. 19, dumped as much as an inch on parts of the North Coast, the most for that date since 1967. August usually sees no rain.

What rain does to grapes is both obvious and subtle. The obvious part is that grape roots will take up water and efficiently distribute it to the grapes, enlarging them and diluting their flavor components. If the rain stops and sunny warmth returns, this dilution can be reversed.

Less obvious is the effect on the grape skin. If the skin is penetrated by mold spores--easier with thin-skinned grapes than with thick-skinned ones--the result is both irreversible and tasteable. Wines, especially white wines, can show a taste of rot and suffer early oxidation. Enzymes from the mold accelerate oxidation and destroy the pigments that give wines their color.

So what that first rain, along with warm weather, means for grapes also depends upon the variety. It’s largely a matter of whether the grape is thin-skinned (Zinfandel, Chardonnay, Petite Sirah) or thick-skinned (Cabernet Sauvignon).

The nature of cluster shape--tight bunches such as Pinot Noir or airy, loose clusters such as Cabernet--makes a difference too. Tight-cluster, thin-skinned grapes are likely to rot (and quickly), while hang-loose tougher-skinned varieties aren’t.

“Chardonnay saw some bunch rot,” says Bob Sessions, winemaker and manager of Sonoma County’s Hanzell Vineyards. “We got a little bit of rot. We would have gotten more, but immediately after the rain we went out and pulled a lot of leaves. That opens up the canopy and allows drying air to get to the clusters.”

The signature of this year’s harvest, its abundant yields, is revealed by Hanzell Vineyards, famed for its very low yields. Sessions says with a gee-whiz awe, “Really, it’s historical. Typically, we get about 40 tons of grapes total between our Chardonnay and Pinot Noir. This year we got 110 tons. That’s about 3 1/2 tons an acre, which for us is huge.”

Another low-yield specialist, Mayacamas Vineyards high up on Mt. Veeder in Napa Valley, also saw what was for it a big crop. “It’s the biggest quantity we’ve seen in four years,” owner-winemaker Bob Travers says. “I mean, we got over one ton an acre on the Chardonnay.” At first I thought he was joking. He wasn’t. “A big Chardonnay crop for us is 3/4 ton an acre,” Travers insists.

As for bunch rot, Mayacamas Vineyards escaped without a blemish. “The evaporation rate from the dry weather after the rain--we got 88/100 of an inch--was fast enough that the rot never got a chance to take hold,” Travers says. “We started harvesting on Aug. 25 and, unusually, there were no stops and starts. We were really lucky.”

Mayacamas Vineyards’ one-ton-to-the-acre Chardonnay yield is so preposterously low it’s almost laughable. Some growers had Chardonnay yields as high as six to eight tons an acre, but nobody’s exactly bragging about it.

“The crop has been so big,” says Hanzell’s Sessions, “that some growers in the Central Valley who turned down offers of $450 a ton for Chardonnay in mid-season now can’t sell it for as little as $300 a ton.”

Such information about lowered Chardonnay grape prices reveals the likely softening of the market with the equally likely result of stable or lowered wine prices in the next year.

So how is the 1997 harvest? At this moment, anybody who claims to know is spinning yarns from too many disparate threads. We know it’s a big crop. But once all the bunch rot has been eliminated before the grapes are crushed, the effective size will decline.

But how successful a vintage it will be depends on the grape variety in question (thin-skinned or thick-skinned) and, above all, when the grower chose to harvest. Many growers harvested both early and later, as rains delayed ripening for one or another grape variety.

Until the mid-September downpour, growers were exclaiming over the near-perfect sugars and acidities. Those who hauled in their crop by then probably will see some swell wines.

“I can’t believe the color on the red varieties,” says Doug Shafer of Napa Valley’s Shafer Vineyards. “Even after just 24 hours in the vat, the Cabernet is incredibly dark.”

This was echoed by several other producers as well. “The color is simply amazing,” says Tom Ferrell, director of Spring Mountain Vineyard above St. Helena in Napa Valley. “The Cabernet should be a stunner in ’97.”

This vintage will see California winemakers perfecting an old European tradition: “I harvested before the rain, but my neighbors didn’t.” When the wines are tasted, we will all be scratching our heads as to how, amazingly, everyone said they harvested before the rains, yet some wines will taste distinctly dilute.