Years of drought causing early harvest in California’s wine country
SAN FRANCISCO — In Northern California’s wine country, the 2015 harvest has arrived shockingly early, amid years of drought that have progressively shifted vines’ growing season earlier into the year.
Winemakers are scrambling to keep pace, and many worry about the financial implications of an extremely low-yielding crop.
“I’ve been making wine for 38 years, and this is the second-earliest harvest I’ve ever seen,” said Eileen Crane, CEO and winemaker of Domaine Carneros, who began picking on July 31.
Many growers of Pinot Noir in Sonoma and Mendocino counties, and in cool pockets of Santa Barbara, are already well into their harvest. (The timeline for later-ripening grape varieties such as Cabernet Sauvignon remains to be seen.) John Bucher, of Bucher Vineyard in Healdsburg, says that he usually starts picking Pinot the first week of September. “This year, we’ll be done for sure by the end of August,” he said. “Which sounds crazy — to finish before we typically start.”
Said Dave Keatly, winemaker at Pinot specialist Flowers winery: “We’re a full three weeks earlier than what we would consider typical for west Sonoma County.”
Not only has the harvest come early, it’s progressing more quickly. In many cases, especially for Pinot producers, a picking schedule that would stretch over a month is being condensed into about a week.
“It’s the shortest harvest we’ve ever had. Six or seven days,” said Raj Parr, of Sandhi and Domaine de la Cote in Santa Barbara County.
Finally, yields are low. Crane estimates that the crop from her estate vineyards will be about 25 percent below average.
The drought is among several factors contributing to this unusual vintage.
An early 2014 harvest pushed up the 2015 growing season. Drought conditions — a warm, dry winter — then accelerated budbreak, which marks the beginning of a vine’s life cycle.
“We normally see budbreak around March 15,” said Bucher. “This year we got it just before Valentine’s Day.”
Cool weather during flowering in the spring led to uneven ripening, a phenomenon known as “the hen and the chick,” in which grapes ripen at different rates.
“You’ve got a lot of really ripe berries and green berries on the same cluster,” said Joe Nielsen, winemaker at Donelan Family Wines in Santa Rosa.
The good news, Neilsen said, is that fewer ripe grapes mean more concentrated flavors. But it takes a little more work in the winery to isolate them from their unripe neighbors.
Grape growers emphasized that although this year’s harvest is early, it doesn’t mean that the growing season was short. The grapes are physiologically mature, and the advantage of having ripe levels of sugars in early August, rather than early September, is that they retain more acid. As a result, the vintage shows the potential for both richness and elegance — a winemaker’s ideal.
“The acid profiles are just gorgeous,” said Keatly. “I’ve never seen it this good.”
Still, some expressed disappointment at the size of the crop. “Quality potentially could be the best ever; I just wish we had more grapes,” said Parr. “You make the best with what you have, but it’s kind of depressing.”
Despite the small crop, 2015 wine prices are not expected to rise. Premium wine producers will gripe, but they can generally absorb the costs incurred by lower yields, simply because their bottle prices are high enough.
And at the other end of the market, a grape shortage will probably stabilize bulk wine prices, which had begun to decline after the enormous crops of 2013 and 2014.