Wine

Gambling With Mother Nature

When It Comes to the Weather, Winemakers Play by the House Rule

    Growing grapes is a lot like playing blackjack with a stacked deck that favors the house. The house in this case is also known as Mother Nature. Once in a while Lady Luck smiles on you; however, this year she turned a very cold shoulder, somewhat literally, to our California grape growers.
    On the weather front, 2008 has definitely been a grower’s bad dream, leading to a shortage of grapes in an expanding wine-consumption market. This situation sent winery owners scrambling for grapes, and although growers want to plant, they are very cautious, unable to foresee the outcome of the big blackjack game that is winemaking.
    Our spring weather was alarming: We had more hard frosts than anyone can remember in recent history, with some growers losing their whole crop to five nights of 25-degree weather. Growers can generally deal with the frigid temperatures by spraying water on the tender vegetation, which coats them with an ice ball that actually emits a small amount of heat as it freezes, and saves the shoots. This year, however, temperatures dropped so low that all the water in the world would not have made a difference. (However, a lot of hillside grape-growing areas were above the frost and did very well.)
    We had an additional setback in 2008 when it stopped raining in February, leaving reservoirs low and wells dry. Thus, this year many growers used up most of their water trying to save their crops, but that left little with which to actually water the surviving vines.
    Fortunately, vines have secondary and tertiary buds that will sprout if the first ones are damaged, and this did happen in many vineyards. But problems arise here, as well. It becomes very hard to tell the first-bud from the second-bud grapes; they mature at different times, which can result in unbalanced wines. All that presupposes one has enough water to keep the vines going.
    California is not the only wine-growing region facing adversity. Australia has lost 30 percent of its vineyards due to a prolonged drought, and Europe is facing a water shortage due to lack of snowfall in the Alps, which means that bota bags may again be filled with Schnapps instead of wine.
    All I’m saying here is that Mother Nature took some money to the bank this year, and good wine may be more expensive, and cheap wine may be more expensive. This is all happening in the context of a very tough real estate market, a lagging economy and billions of dollars pouring into a protracted foreign war. The bright spot here is that Americans are discovering the joys of wine in record numbers, and sales are continuing to soar. Wine may actually turn out to be one of our most important local liquid assets.
    Most of our fine Northern and Central California wineries strive for quality over quantity, and even in a tough year, great winemakers seem to triumph with some excellent renditions of our favorite product. Wine writers and publications sometimes tend to predict the worst for everyone in a tough vintage; however, if you pick and choose carefully, some real gems can find their way into your cellar at a good price. So let’s not jump to conclusions about this vintage, and when the wines actually roll out the front door, please be your own judge.
    In any event, let’s all hope for lives full of 21s, lucky sevens, straight flushes, great bottles of Zinfandel and a smile from Mother Nature.

—By Kent Rosenblum