Is Big Chill For Real?

In agriculture, no news is good news. Unfortunately, there was big news this spring in California’s wine country--although reports of the imminent collapse of the wine industry due to frost appear to be slightly exaggerated.

The worst late-spring frost in three decades hit vineyards in the coastal regions early this month. A series of fast-moving storms from the Gulf of Alaska brought waves of cold air that took temperatures below freezing for several nights at a time throughout April. The series of heavy frosts coincided with the year’s first big surge of vine growth, decimating the nascent grape crop in some places.

Chardonnay and Merlot suffered the most damage. Both tend to bud early in the spring, and thus had about three weeks of growth vulnerable to the burning cold. The heaviest damage was reported in western Russian River Valley (including Green Valley), the Clarksburg district in the Sacramento Delta, Carneros, Redwood Valley and parts of Lake County.

Frost has the same effect on plants as fire, which is why the word burn is used to describe frost damage. Freezing dehydrates the vine’s tender new growth, destroying cell walls and sucking out every drop of moisture to leave a mess of withered, discolored tissue. “It looks like somebody’s taken a blowtorch in there and blackened all those beautiful green shoots,” is how Beringer Vineyards grape buyer George Buonaccorsi describes it. “There’s nothing more depressing.”

However depressing, this spring frost wasn’t nearly the dire tragedy presented by many news sources. In the news business, no news is bad news. Reporters everywhere have favorite local topics they can count on for a juicy headline. In California, they pounce on weather events that affect the state’s $1.6 billion wine industry.

Frost, rain and drought are often presented as if they were the end of the world, when they are merely among the routine challenges facing an industry that deals with the vagaries of nature every day.

Especially misleading are wild headlines such as “Vineyard Frost Damage in Millions.” A Wine Spectator article featured a secondhand quote from an insurance broker, who said there was a 15% reduction in the potential crop. In fact, early-season frost damage doesn’t show up immediately, and can’t be fully reckoned until the crop comes in, which is why state officials and grower organizations have refrained from putting a price tag on the event.

“Overall, it’s not a big issue,” said Buonaccorsi, who buys about 50,000 tons of grapes statewide each year (equivalent to about 2.5 million cases of wine). “At this point, everybody [who has frost protection systems] has been able to protect pretty well.”

Andy Beckstoffer, who farms about 2,500 acres of vines in Napa, Mendocino and Lake counties, was also skeptical of the high damage claims. “It sounds inflated from my side,” he said. “It takes awhile to tell. You can have some burned leaves and the fruit will still come out.”

Navarro Vineyards winemaker/manager Jim Klein said in Mendocino County’s Anderson Valley, it was spring business as usual. “We face stuff like this all the time,” he said. “We often get these northerly storms at budbreak. This is farming. Some people like to go to Las Vegas or Reno, but farming is the ultimate gamble. You’re on the come line with nature.”

But everyone I talked to emphasized that devastating damage could result if the frost season extends into May. The danger: running out of water.

Growers currently use two forms of protection. The most effective is overhead sprinklers. They coat the foliage with moisture, which then freezes to form a barrier that protects plant tissue down to an air temperature of about 24 degrees.

The disadvantage, especially in a drought-prone region, is that it takes about 55 gallons of water per minute to protect one acre of vines. An extended frost siege can deplete a well or drain a pond, especially in a low-rainfall year like this one. When the water runs out, the vines are defenseless.

Windmills, consisting of long-blade propellers driven by $40,000 aircraft engines mounted on towers, circulate the air to mitigate freezing. They can run night after night (although it’s expensive), but are only about half as effective as sprinklers.

What makes a frost watch so nerve-racking is that neither option works against the kind of extreme freeze that struck some places. “Nothing we’ve got will protect over 8 degrees below freezing,” Beckstoffer told me. “When you get below that, you’re through.”

Several news reports have compared this frost to the infamous frost of 1970. Not so, said Beckstoffer, who experienced the ’70 frost as the vineyard manager for Beaulieu Vineyards. “It’s not even close,” he scoffed. “We had 28 days of temperatures in the low 20s, and from right around day 17 we ran out of fuel for the pots. The frost went up and down the valley, way beyond what we could control. There was no place that didn’t get hit.”

For 28 straight days, subfreezing temperatures threatened to destroy the newly awakened vines. It remains the longest frost period in California’s recorded viticultural history.

“It was like a war,” recalled Beckstoffer in his soft Virginia drawl. “It was man against nature.” Then just 30 and new to the valley, Beckstoffer had played a key role in organizing the purchase of Beaulieu Vineyards by Heublein Corp. Suddenly, he found himself fighting to defend the source of the new acquisition’s expected profits.

In 1970, they were still using oil-burning smudge pots. After midnight, as the temperature began to plummet, crews would go out and begin lighting the squat metal pots filled with low-grade oil. Each morning revealed a pall of smoke turning blood-red in the sunrise. “A big decision every night was how many pots to light at one time,” explained Beckstoffer. “The problem was that there was only one guy delivering oil to the whole valley. If you burned up all your oil, you wouldn’t be able to get more delivered by the next night, and you were in big trouble.”

Beckstoffer recalled riding around through the wee hours every morning in a pickup truck with BV wine master Andre Tchelistcheff, their headlights boring holes through dense black smoke as they anxiously watched a thermometer mounted outside the windshield. “It felt like being on a battlefield,” said Beckstoffer. “We were doing that every night, and then doing our regular jobs during the day. Every grower in the valley was doing that. There were a lot of real tired guys, I’m telling you. I’ve never been through anything like it.”

After awhile, he says, fatigue took its toll and men started snapping. “They just couldn’t take it anymore. After 26 days a lot of guys said it must be over, and they went home. And the last two nights were the worst.”

That frost cut the 1970 crop by 50%--and that reduced yield produced wines of legendary power and concentration. The ’70 BV Private Reserve and Freemark Abbey Bosche, to choose two examples from many, are still impressive Cabernets.

In the big picture, this “killer frost” may be considered a particularly exciting prologue to the next performance of the annual nature-scripted drama called the growing season. Depending on how the rest of the plot develops, it may one day be remembered as a factor in the outstanding character of vintage 2001.

*

Smith is writer-at-large for Wine & Spirits Magazine.