The Harvest Brings Hope for Vintage 2002

The blackberries are finished in the Russian River Valley. The air smells like apples. It’s time to pick Pinot Noir.

As of this week, the 2002 vintage is shaping up to be superb. That’s a flash of good news for an industry that otherwise has little to crow about. Slow sales, the resulting oversupply of wine grapes, and aggressive competition from opportunistic foreign producers have Golden State vintners reeling.

The early harvest of high-acid, low-sugar grapes for sparkling wines is winding down on North Coast vineyards. Now the heart of the batting order comes up--leading off with Pinot, then on to Sauvignon Blanc, Zinfandel, Chardonnay, Merlot and Syrah. Last comes the cleanup hitter, Cabernet Sauvignon.

As the steel-nerved Cabernet growers sweat out the possibility of early rain, the much-anticipated Pinot harvest is kicking into gear in the coastal valleys north of San Francisco. The summer cycle of alternating heat and fog has brought grapes in the coastal regions of Sonoma, Mendocino and Napa counties to the brink of magnificent ripeness.

On Saturday, Hampton Bynum toiled up and down steep vine rows in Green Valley, just south of the Russian River in western Sonoma County, filling a plastic bag with grapes from throughout the vineyard. Every once in a while, one or two would find their way into his mouth. “Mmm,” he said. “They really taste good, almost ready to pick.”

Perhaps there have been sweeter grape growing seasons. It would have been nice for a lot of growers to skip this year’s unseasonable late-spring rains--although then the crop would have been bigger and the quality probably lower. And it would have been more peaceful if there hadn’t been any heat spikes in July and August--but then the grapes wouldn’t have such chewy skins full of thick, soft tannins.

“We’re just starting to pick, and we’re really happy with the fruit,” said Bynum, who bottles half a dozen Pinots each year under the Davis Bynum label established by his father. “It’s a fairly small crop, but the ripeness is pretty uniform and we’re seeing wonderful flavor at fairly low sugars.”

Translation: Expect vibrant, delicious wines with decent alcohol levels.

A Vintage Story

Picking was also underway at Truchard Vineyards in Carneros, another cool, Pinot-oriented area. “We started Pinot yesterday,” Jo Ann Truchard said last week. “We’ve had an incredibly cool summer, but some of our new Dijon clones are ripe already. The Pinot tastes wonderful.” Jo Ann and her husband, Tony, sell fruit to 30 wineries.

Every vintage tells a story. Some are dream-come-true fairy tales, like 1997’s rare combination of large crop and superb quality. Others are tales of intrigue and ultimate betrayal, like the roller-coaster season of 1989 that ended with much of the crop being washed out by hard September rains.

Aside from a rather stormy May and a few blast-furnace days in late summer, the 2002 growing season has been moderate. Pretty boring, in fact.

Boring sounds good to a grape grower. No news is good news to anyone in agriculture, and grape growers in particular because of the large sums of money at stake. With top-quality Pinot Noir currently worth $3,000 to $5,000 a ton, growers are relieved that ’02 was a slow-news summer.

This is a critical time in vineyards throughout the Northern Hemisphere. Last week vintners in Barolo, Italy, sobbed over a potentially magnificent crop destroyed by hail, while vignerons in Bordeaux begged the sun god to smile on their underripe grapes. In Northern California, they’re simply hoping the offshore Pacific high pressure system keeps storms at bay just a little bit longer.

Everyone is acutely conscious that meteorologists are predicting a sodden winter, courtesy of El Nino. El Nino winters often start early with big September rains. That would not only put a damper on the harvest, it would aggravate the economy’s negative effects on the grape market. But the only thing to do is wait: The grapes aren’t ripe until they’re ripe.

The Changing Grape

A growing season starts as a clean slate. Day by day, the potential character and style of the year’s wines develop on the vine. The early period sets the general parameters for the vine’s growth and for how the fruit will develop. As the season progresses, the characteristics of the eventual wine are redefined day by day in response to weather.

From the beginning the vine is preparing for veraison, the point in the season (usually mid-July) where the grapes change from their uniform flat green color to show their variety. Black grapes begin to show pink with increasingly darker shades of purple. White grapes go from green to gold, and in some cases (such as Gewurztraminer) into pink tones.

Before that, between the time the clusters develop until around mid-July, there is virtually no appearance of change in the hard, green orbs. Don’t be fooled, said an expert in grape ripening.

Douglas O. Adams, a professor of viticulture and enology at UC Davis, explained it this way: “We’ve just come to realize that the berry gets poised for that change well before the actual event, which represents a major change in the physiology of the berry.

“It goes from an organ that is accumulating acids to one that is metabolizing acids, from an organ that’s not accumulating sugar to one that’s accumulating sugar at a higher rate than any other fruit we know about. A berry right before veraison contains very little sugar. Right after veraison it can jump to 5% sugar in a few days.”

Here Come the Reds

Next up will be Zinfandel and related varieties in warmer areas such as the Dry Creek and Alexander valleys. Near Geyserville at Ridge Vineyards’ Lytton Springs vineyard, workers picked Sauvignon Blanc over the weekend, and now attention is turning toward the big reds.

On Saturday, David Gates, Ridge’s vineyard manager, was also popping grapes into his mouth as he walked rows of bushy, tree-like old Zinfandel, Petite Sirah and Grenache vines.

“The first thing you get is a real sweet, grapy flavor,” he said. “Then you spit out seeds and bite the skin and get a blast of tannin. Some of the tannins are still chalky or grainy, but they’re softening fast. And this year the flavors are really good at low sugar. That’s good in grapes, and good in wines.”

Gates expressed hope and defiance at the prospect of early rain. “Everybody that’s got an arthritic toe says it’s going to rain like hell this year,” he said. “The forecasters say it could start early. But if it waits three more weeks so we can get all the Zinfandel in, I don’t care what happens.”