Early pickings
The chaotic 2014 harvest may be a sign of changes still to come
What harvest? Because if you blinked while driving past California’s vineyards this year, you might have missed it. The 2014 wine harvest has been one of the most compact, and earliest, in recent memory, certainly since 2004. It began when we were barely into the dog days. By this month, many winemakers were done.
It all adds up to still more signs that old expectations about the growing season are being supplanted by a new, and chaotic, normal.
“The nesting month of August was taken away from us,” says Gavin Chanin, who makes wine in Santa Barbara and Sonoma for the Chanin and Lutum labels. “But we got October vacations, so fair trade.”
Although many winemakers felt as if they were running at double speed this harvest, Chanin’s schedule wasn’t atypical, in that his sleepless stretch lasted about 40 days. What was unusual was when it began: Aug. 4. Usually, at this point in the fall, he’d have another two weeks of work in the cellar.
He was finished about three weeks ago.
Many winemakers choose to pick later, of course, and are still fermenting grapes. But the early pace was widespread. Napa Valley’s grape growers — and Napa is a spot that doesn’t usually wind down until November is approaching — estimated in the second week of October that the valley’s farmers were 95 percent done and were set to wrap up this week.
Sonoma was similar; winemakers last week reported they were about 90 percent finished, some two weeks ahead of schedule.
Consider how many Northern California vintners indulge in a late-season-ripeness game of chicken, and these early curtain calls are astonishing.
What’s up? The obvious answers are drought and weather, although not in ways you might expect. Persistent drought over several years and a mild winter led to a remarkably early and even bud break for vines, slowed only by a bit of winter rain. In other words, it’s not that the season was short, it’s that it started so early. The only delays were a bit of rain in September and somewhat less sunshine, since the early harvest got under way when Fogust was still delivering its marine layer.
Even some Central Coast areas, like parts of Paso Robles, that weren’t as far ahead as Northern California early on, had more than caught up by September. In Paso, picking came fast and furious. There, as elsewhere, many grapes all ripened around the same time. In some cases, a two-month harvest run was squeezed into just three weeks.
“There’s been a couple of compressed years here, but nothing like this,” says Brian Terrizzi of the Giornata and Broadside labels in Paso Robles.
That threw even some veteran winemakers off their game.
“It was about as challenging as anything we’d ever seen, and a little frustrating, to be honest,” says Ted Lemon of Littorai, who harvests mostly Chardonnay and Pinot Noir near the Sonoma and Mendocino coasts.
What bedeviled Lemon wasn’t merely the early picking — the growing season provided plenty of advance warning — but how frenetic the season was. Lemon has been harvesting in California since the mid-1980s, but even his well-honed sense of timing couldn’t dial in his ideal levels of ripeness and acidity: “There was no rhythm to it.”
Chanin, too, was puzzled by how some grapes came in — less by their amply ripe flavors and
“It was about as
challenging as
anything we’d
ever seen, and a little frustrating, to be honest.”
Ted Lemon, Littorai
tannins than by their acidity. Santa Barbara fruit seemed to lose its acidity early, which could yield fleshy, more powerful wines. But his Sonoma grapes seemed to retain a lot of acid. It was almost as though the two regions traded places.
The translation: It is difficult to sort out how good the 2014s will ultimately be, although the wines likely will be closer in spirit to last year’s user-friendly vintage than more uneven 2010 or 2011.
As for the drought, while it was on the lips of nearly every grower, it failed to show a major impact. The expectation was that the lack of water would drive down yields, and, in some cases, it did. But seeing as the past two years offered record harvests, at this point nearly anything looks smaller. Beyond that, wine grapes are a relatively stingy crop, waterwise. So ultimately, the drought’s effect was less than that on, say, almonds or tomatoes.
Even the South Napa quake on Aug. 24 had a negligible impact. While some wine in barrel was affected — current estimates place damage around $80 million — grapes for this year’s harvest had barely begun to arrive.
This year’s crazy, then, ends up being much different than the recent string of wacky vintages, like 2010 and cold 2011. If there is a broader conclusion, it’s this: Harvests in California, like the state’s weather, may simply be getting more chaotic and unpredictable.
That’s hardly a cause for alarm. Climate change has become an alarmist trope for the wine industry; certainly, it’s a real issue and an important one. But the impacts are subtler and more systemic. It is more that California’s run of easy times in wine were what they reasonably would be: temporary. Having a challenging year most years is no different today than it was in the days when farming wasn’t nearly so fine-tuned.
It’s simply a matter of learning to adapt, as wine must.
Meantime, for weary cellar hands, there’s an early vacation in the offing. Or, as Berkeley winemaker Chris Brockway half-joked: “We’ll just start bottling our 2014s in November.”