Feeling the heat

Dangerous degrees and my first sip of Chardonnay

God, it was hot! Forget about frying an egg on the sidewalk; this kind of heat would fry an egg inside the chicken. — Rachel Caine

The Sun, with all those planets revolving around it and dependent upon it, can still ripen a bunch of grapes as if it had nothing else in the Universe to do. — Galileo Galilei

Yeah, okay, so it was my idea to become a winegrower. I mean, pretty romantic aspiration, right? Grow some grapes, make some wine, life is good. What could possibly go wrong?

Beyond vine viruses, blights, mold, mildew, spring freezes, winds during bloom, insect pests, poor fruit set, shatter, sunburn, bird-bee-turkey-deer-ground squirrel-gopher damage, earthquakes, mudslides, torrential rain, drought, wildfires, labor shortages, and—here’s a new one—supply chain delays… absolutely nothin’.

Except now we also have heat domes to worry about. And the one we’re currently under is a doozy!

You probably know what’s happening, but just to reiterate: We’re experiencing a heatwave to end all heatwaves—right here in wine country. Today promises to be our seventh day of triple digit temperatures that so far (according to my iPhone) have peaked here in Sonoma at 113 degrees! Santa Rosa, just 18 miles to our north, broke their all-time record with 115 degrees, and Sacramento, an hour to the east by car, broke its highest-ever recorded temperature with 116 degrees. And who knows what will happen today—it’s forecast to be 108 degrees in Sonoma. This dome’s duration and intensity are unprecedented in California. The potential damage that could be inflicted on the tens of thousands of acres of grapes here, most in the final stages of ripening, needs no explanation.

This is really scary for me after all of the time, money and effort I’ve put into building a wine company over the past four years. I know this is what real farmers deal with every year—and I do find some camaraderie in that—but it doesn’t help me sleep any better. The idea that my entire 2022 vintage could literally shrivel up and blow away in 100°+ temperatures is soul-shattering. The survivalist in me comes out and I declare war on the sun!

Bobbie “spritzing” her Malbec grapes, trying to cool them down through evaporation. We’re picking her vineyard this Friday. The fruit demands it.

So, what to do? Some wineries had grapes ready to harvest before the heatwave began. I was lucky—like them—and got our Chardonnay picked well over a week ago. Some wineries had little choice but to pick during the heatwave if their grapes were ready and beginning to dehydrate. I’ve got a couple of vineyards in that category as well. In fact, if you’re reading this early Thursday morning, we’ll be harvesting a beautiful new estate Cabernet Sauvignon vineyard, high on a mountaintop above Lovall Valley, as you enjoy your first cup of coffee.

And a lot of wineries have chosen just to ride it out, asking their growers to irrigate each morning and apply other measures like shade cloth, and afternoon spritz baths to repeatedly coat their fruit in water so that it will quickly evaporate in the heat and cool down the berries. It’s crazy, come about 4:00 pm the internal temperature of the grapes is about ten to fifteen degrees hotter than the air temperature. It almost burns your mouth to eat them, so cooling them down is obviously critical. For many of this last group—yours truly also included with multiple vineyards—the grapes will take a beating, but as my buddy Ken counsels, “they’ll recover.” Gawd, let’s hope so.

Heat-damaged Grenache grapes in a vineyard we were going to pick.

But for some there will be no recovery, the heat damage is too much and the fruit will be dropped. Dreams of an exalted vintage dashed for another year.

It’s almost wine!

Two days ago marked the tenth day of fermentation for our Chardonnay, and we were down to a °Brix reading of 5.8. Still some sugar left to ferment, for sure, but enough alcohol to almost call it wine. It’s been a textbook fermentation curve so far—not too hot and fast, and not too slow—with no evidence of getting “stuck.”

The fermentation sheet for my barrels of Chardonnay gets °Brix and temperature measurements noted each day.

I was ready to taste it!

I found an extra-long glass thief that would allow me to get to the juice beneath the ten inches of headspace left open for fermentation activity, and I pulled a sample. I wasn’t sure what to expect but I was delighted with what it looked like. Imagine the juice from a melted banana popsicle, only kind of creamy and slightly neon bright with lots of suspended solids.

I took a mouthful and swirled it around my tongue like I was judging a premium vintage. It tasted like a bright, citrusy fruit punch that had been spiked. Perhaps a rum punch from the islands, mon? And, I definitely recognized a flavor of Chardonnay with light vanilla and maybe coconut from the oak. No discernible butter yet, but I could sense there was a gigantic evolution of flavor building. A wild creature of a wine being born!