Tablas Creek Vineyard Blog

July Vineyard Photo Album

After a couple of weeks of seasonably warm weather (days in the 90s or low 100s and nights in the 50s) we had a break in the heat from a cut-off low and a resulting deep marine layer.  Sunday and Monday we had fog in the morning, breezy, cool days with highs topping out in the low 70s, and chilly, breezy nights in the mid-40s.  When I got into the vineyard on Monday morning, I was struck by the crispness of the day and headed out into the vineyard to catch the last bits of fog lingering over the vineyard.

I didn't make it in time to get any good photos of the fog, but had a nice walk through the Grenache Noir, Mourvedre and Vermentino blocks on the hill behind the winery.  A few of my favorite shots are below; check out the complete photo album for more.  First, some Grenache vines silhouetted against the sky:

A Grenache Noir cluster, still a few weeks away from veraison:

Looking west over our Grenache block, you can see a block of Syrah as well as (further west) the new section of vineyard we just finished planting:

A look north-east through two Vermentino rows shows Adelaida Road and Halter Ranch in the background:

And finally,  a closeup of a Vermentino vine with the sunlight shining through it:

Not an Easy Life...

When I was out the other day taking the photos of the strange smoky weather, I hiked up to the new block of vines to the extreme western edge of the property.  We planted about 6 new acres here earlier this month, divided fairly equally between Grenache Blanc, Vermentino, and two new clones of Mourvedre.  We're in the third year of a six-year plan to plant an additional 30 acres, with the goal of gradually raising production from our current 16,000 cases to around 22,000 cases.

(I wrote about this in April's planting new vineyard post, where there are photos of the landscape and soils in mid-preparation.)

Now, with the vines in the ground, I was struck by how rugged life is for these little vines (like the Mourvedre "C" vine below) in an area like ours.  The soil is obscured by limestone/clay chunks, and the ground is nearly white:

Of course, this struggle is what allows the vines to produce grapes with concentration and character, and I know it's a mistake to anthropomorphise the vines.  But it  was still a striking reminder of why an area like this, where the vines do struggle and vineyards produce 2 or 3 tons per acre can make wines of so much more distinction than areas where life is easy, average yields are in the 8-10 tons per acre, and farming can be done with machines and chemicals.

An excellent beginning to the growing season, strange smoky weather notwithstanding

With two big fires burning to the north of us in Monterey County over the last few weeks, including the Indians Fire that has burned nearly 60,000 acres in three weeks and the Gallery Fire (just south of Big Sur) that has burned over 13,000 acres since Saturday, we look outside on strange yellow-gray skies and hazy sun.  A photo from earlier this afternoon looks west toward the Santa Lucia Mountains:

The smoke is at its most dramatic in the evening, when sunsets have been brilliant orange.  During the day, I keep looking outside waiting for the thunderstorm to hit (I'm betraying my East Coast origins here).

The smoke actually helps keep things a little cooler around here as the sun's intensity is reduced.  After some very hot weather the second half of last week -- including three consecutive days Thursday 6/19-Saturday 6/21 where high temperatures topped 105 -- any relief is welcome.  Even better, a front passed through and the normal pattern of onshore flow has reformed, meaning that we get a sea breeze in the afternoon and temperatures are usually comfortable by dinnertime.  Lows last night actually dropped into the upper 30s.

The vineyard itself looks very healthy, with a good fruit set and no pressure from any pests except for ground squirrels.  Two photos should give you a sense of what things look like out there.  Typically, what we'd worry about at this stage is shatter (where a large percentage of flowers are unfertilized, leading to clusters with only a few scattered berries) which is most common in Grenache.  No worries on that score.  Two shots in the Grenache (left) and Grenache Blanc (right) show excellent fruit set:

And finally, a long view of the vineyard, looking from our "New Hill" section north across small plots of head-pruned Tannat and Picpoul to our main south-west and south-east facing slopes of Grenache.  Note the strange (for Paso Robles) pale blue-grey sky:

A bullet dodged: only minor vineyard damage from a serious California-wide frost event

California was badly zapped last week by a deep trough of cold air that spread south from Canada and brought freezing nights from Mendocino to Santa Barbara.  The perils presented by this frost were made more severe by the fact that it followed a week of unusually warm weather, where it neared 90 degrees at Tablas Creek and was well over 90 in downtown Paso Robles.  Nearly the whole vineyard had sprouted, in many cases 6 inches or more.

As the frost approached last weekend, forecasts looked terrifying.  On frosty nights, the weather station at Tablas Creek is typically the coldest in Paso Robles, and it is not even in the coldest spot on the property.  Forecasts were suggesting that temperatures would range from 26-33 degrees in the appellation, which we usually project to temperatures as low as 23 or 24 in our coldest spots.  When it's this cold, the frost prevention fans that we use aren't effective; the only way to save the new growth is with overhead sprinklers.  And we don't have enough water for those.

We did indeed have three cold nights in a row.  The nights of the 21st, 22nd and 23rd of April all registered lows at our weather station between 28 and 29 degrees.  But, in an unusual reversal, it was colder on the east side of town than out at Tablas Creek.  And, Paso Robles seems to have been less heavily hit than other regions; Napa, Sonoma and the Sierra Foothills all report significant damage, and even vintners I've spoken to in Santa Ynez see more damage than we do.

In driving around the vineyard this afternoon with my dad, we'd estimate maybe 5% of new growth has been damaged by this frost.  A typical section is below, with some vines at the very bottom of a swale showing browning, but the vast majority of the vineyard looking fine:

As always, the frost damage is curiously selective, with damaged shoots just inches away from others that are fine.  Still, given how scary things looked a week ago, we're counting ourselves very lucky.

We hope that we're largely out of the danger zone now; it hit 90 degrees here both days this weekend.  And we always figure that once we get into May we're pretty much safe.  And we're ready for a break.  We ran our frost fans seventeen nights this spring, nearly double our annual average.

Earth Day thoughts on sustainability in the world of wine

Today is the 39th annual Earth Day celebration, and a great time to assess wine's progress on its quest for sustainability.  Wine, like any other agricultural product, has environmental impacts from its vineyard and winery practices, and additional impacts from its packaging and marketing (Tyler Coleman had an interesting op-ed piece in the New York Times on wine's carbon footprint).  It's great that so many wineries are talking about their efforts toward sustainability.  It's less clear to me (as I pointed out in a post from last spring) that the actions of many of these wineries match their rhetoric.

Last weekend, we participated in the Earth Day Food & Wine Festival here in Paso Robles.  This event is organized by the Central Coast Vineyard Team, who is (in their own words) "a non-profit collaboration of agriculture and natural resource professionals with a shared dedication to sustainable winegrowing".   The event was great, very well attended and organized, with attendees exceptionally interested in how each exhibitor was practicing sustainability.  When we told the people who came by our table that we were, in fact, certified organic, many were surprised that we needed to make a point of that.  They had assumed that everyone there, or most everyone, was organic.  In fact, there were only three wineries (of the fifty or so there) who are certified.

There are lots of ways that wineries can be sustainable without being organic, and I don't want to denigrate the efforts that many of these wineries are making.  Any approach that reduces any negative environmental or social impacts that a business may foster needs to be encouraged.  I think that Brian Talley of Talley Vineyards deserves particular credit for expanding the understanding of sustainability to encompass the quality of life and affordable housing through his Fund for Vineyard and Farm Workers. 

Wine is one of the best agricultural crops, on many levels, in terms of environmental impacts.  Vines are planted and left for decades, so you don't have topsoil loss and erosion from annual tilling.  Wine grapes are generally watered very little, and with high-efficiency drip irrigation, so they're low-impact on water use or runoff.  Similarly, the best vineyards tend to be nutrient-poor, so there is little incentive to fertilize heavily.  There are very few devastating grapevine pests, so most vineyards are rarely sprayed with pesticides.  And vineyards are a sufficiently value-added commodity that once a vineyard has been planted the land is rarely redeveloped for housing or other higher-impact uses.

Still, there's a wide range of practices in the world of wine.  Most vineyards do have some pesticides applied.  Most also spray with herbicide under the vine rows to prevent competition with weeds.  Commercial fertilizers, too, see some application.  Enormous quantities of water are used in the cellar for the production of wine, as tanks, barrels and crush equipment need to be cleaned after each use.  And the environmental impacts of packaging, shipping and marketing wine are significant.

Even out in our neighborhood, you can see wineries who preach sustainability but whose practices speak of expediency.  And it's a shame.  Wine grapes have to be one of the easiest products to grow organically, as they don't require much fertilization or pest control, and weed control can be conducted mechanically (see an earlier post on organic weed control).  Winery wastewater can be recaptured and used for other purposes (as in our wetlands area).  Particularly surprising to us is that more people haven't made the plunge to get the added intensity, flavorfulness, and character of place in organically farmed wines.

I think it's great to celebrate the progress that the wine community has made in environmental consciousness, but I also think it's too bad more haven't taken the plunge to become fully organic.  And, it's high time we created objective, enforceable criteria for the designation of "sustainable" so that wineries have standards to meet and so that the designation does not become diluted into meaninglessness.

Vineyard Photos of New Growth

I love going out into the vineyard at this time of year to take pictures.  The yellowy-green color of the new growth is beautiful, and the cover crop is in full flower.  Plus, the hills are gorgeous.  Note that you can get full-screen images of all the photos on this post (and, for that matter, this blog) by clicking on the thumbnails.

A hillside of Grenache is well out, with a small block of Mourvedre visible to the back right barely sprouted:

The trick for me in catching these shots is being able to get the position of the sun correct.  In order to really showcase that yellow-green, you need to be taking the photo into or at an angle into the sun, but without getting glare.  A Chardonnay vine (from our small block for our Antithesis Chardonnay) glows with sunlight:

The other thing I try to get in the photos is a sense of (for lack of a better term) near and far.  Using a zoom to shorten the field of focus helps.  The photo below is of the same Grenache block as the first photo.

Finally, a more traditional view, looking east over a hillside of newly-sprouted Roussanne back toward west-facing Scruffy Hill, still in shadow in the early morning:

Planting new vineyard: getting ready for more Mourvedre, Grenache Blanc and Vermentino

We realized a few years ago that our demand was growing, and (as we took a break in planting after 2000 to get our marketing in order) that if we didn't start planting soon, we'd start running dangerously short on wine.  It takes three years in a best-case scenario to start getting crop off of a new planting, and the thin soils, dry summers and high diurnal swings in temperatures make the best-case scenario rare.  So, we analyzed the 30 or so acres that we had left to plant and decided to plant five acres a year for six years.  Our demand is growing at about 1000 cases per year, and 5 acres produce (at our yields of about 3 tons per acre) roughly 1000 cases of wine.

We started our new round of planting in the winter of 2005-2006 on what we call "Scruffy Hill" on the far side of Tablas Creek (I posted on this in January 2006).  In that roughly 11-acre block we planted head-pruned, non-irrigated Mourvedre and Grenache along with small amounts of Syrah, Tannat and Picpoul.  Planting head-pruned without irrigation is much less intensive in the amount of work and expense involved, so we figured we'd start there.

With Scruffy Hill planted, we're now looking to a gorgeous block to the west of the property, with two ridges that run north-south surrounding a shallow valley.  The ridge slopes give us nice east- and west-facing hillsides, and the ridge tops are just packed with calcareous deposits:



This has the potential to be one of the best blocks of vineyard we farm.  The first stage in planting is to hammer the end posts for the trellises into the ground.  I loved the photogenic geometry of these half-finished tasks:



The second stage is digging the trenches that we'll need for irrigation.  These are at the tops of the ridges so that the water can flow downhill through the drip irrigation tubing. The two irrigation ditches (east on the left, west on the right):

The third phase is adding the interior posts and stringing the training wires, and only then do we get to plant the vines.  The vines that we've decided on are Vermentino and Grenache Blanc for the east-facing slope, and Mourvedre for the south-facing slope.  Finally, two more views of the new property.  First, the east-facing slope:

And second, the valley, with a view into the Santa Lucia Mountains behind:

Frost Damage

As I'd feared when I posted about the early budbreak a week or so ago, we got a frost Sunday night.  And not a little one, either.  It got down to 27 degrees at the weather station in the center of the vineyard, which means that the coldest spots were a couple of degrees colder than that.  Fortunately, much of the vineyard wasn't out yet, but we did see some damage in all the sections of the vineyard that had sprouted.  Even the tops of the hills, which normally avoid our radiation frosts, saw some damage.  A photo of some Grenache vines shows the quirky nature of frost damage.  One sprout can be frozen while another a few inches away is fine:

Overall, we'd classify this as having a mild to moderate impact.  We'll see some effects from this throughout the growing season, but it doesn't look like it will seriously cut down either on production or on the quality of the growing season this year.

Of course, we still have over a month to go before we can relax... but we look pretty safe this week, with rain forecast for tomorrow and then a warming trend for the rest of the week.

Budbreak is terrifying (but hopeful)

With the recent warm weather, we're starting to see budbreak in our earlier-sprouting varietals, particularly Viognier and Grenache.  A Grenache vine pushes, below:

As usual, we're seeing earlier budbread at the tops of the hills, which are less often frosted because the cold air slumps down the hillsides and settles in low-lying areas.  Many mornings, the temperature difference between the hilltops and the valleys is as much as 8 degrees.  Our hilltops tend to receive their last frosts in early April, while our valleys are prone to frosts all the way into May.  In fact, one morning last June, Neil Collins (our winemaker, who lives on the property with his family, in one of the lowest, coldest spots near the creek) emerged to find ice on his car.

Budbreak is a touch early this year; normally, we don't see it until the first or second week of April.  And this early start is plenty scary.  We normally get a few limited frosts in the second half of April, and are at real risk of a killing freeze in early April.  Neil doesn't really relax until Wine Festival, the third weekend of May.

One element we have in our defense against frosts is our frost-protection fan system, with which we blow cold air that has pooled in a low-lying area up a chimney, allowing it to be replaced by the warmer air that may be just a few feet above.  One of these octagonal fans is visible in the background of the photo below:

Budbreak does not hit the entire vineyard evenly.  Not only do the tops of the hills push first, but younger vines push earlier.  (As if we needed another reason to appreciate older vines!)  Below, a replanted vine is several inches out while the older vines on either side have barely sprouted:

At the same time, budbreak is hopeful -- a symbol of renewal.  Each year, you have the chance to make something you've never made before, and with the vineyard a year older than it's ever been, every expectation that your ceiling is higher than it's ever been.  So, you hold your breath and know that each cold night you avoid a major frost, the Northern Hemisphere tilts slightly more toward the sun, the days get a few minutes longer and you're one day closer to not having to worry through those cold nights.  Finally, two more photos, both of which (for me) catch the hopefulness of the season:

A sweet sweet-pea photo

The weather here has been beautiful over the past two weeks: warm and sunny, with days in the 70s and even (in the past couple of days) into the 80s.  On one level, this is scary; we're already seeing the first signs of bud break in some of the higher (warmer) parts of the vineyard, and we're at risk of frost until May.  Expect more on bud break and some photos later this week.  But, between the warmth and all the rain we've gotten this winter, the cover crops have established themselves beautifully and the vineyard is lush and green.

And now, like the rest of the Paso Robles flora, the cover crops are starting to flower.  Here's a pretty shot of a sweet pea, one of the components of our typical cover crop mix because it's a legume, and fixes nitrogen into the soil.