During early spring in vineyards everywhere (in the northern hemisphere at least), the vines stand at parade rest. The excitement of the harvest is nearly half a year away and only the bright green grass or vivid yellow mustard plants between the rows hint at the reawakening that eventually will bring forth a new crop of grapes.
The buds were swollen the first week in March, according to Steve Hosmer, a Napa Valley wine educator. “Soon we will be seeing tiny fan-shaped green leaves. The week after that, shoots 3/8- to 1/2-inch long will emerge.
“It’s not as visually exciting as the flowering (in May), but it is very reassuring. This year it’s right on schedule.”
Nature’s “schedule” has white-grape vines such as chardonnay and riesling and lighter reds such as pinot noir leading the bud-break parade. The buds on red vines such as zinfandel are swelling but won’t put forth shoots until perhaps a week later. Due to California’s length and geographical variations, bud break throughout the state takes place over two to three weeks. In the Midwest, vines start to grow when the average daily temperature crosses the 50-degree mark, usually early to mid-May.
“All you can do at this period (late March) is wait, watch and frost protect,” said Ed Killian, winemaker at Chateau Souverain in the Sonoma Valley.
The buds swell and push cautiously. With good reason. Cold and mold are threats to their well-being.
A single frost can kill numerous young buds or shoots and seriously curtail the year’s crop. To combat it, any time the temperature drops to 35 degrees, alarms go off in the vineyards and sprinklers and wind machines are activated. When used with heaters, the machines may dissipate the cold air. Water from the sprinklers freezes on the vine, forming a protective coating over the shoots.
Babysitting the vines
Even before bud break, the vineyard crew already was active. They fertilized what Killian calls “spotty areas” where the soil lacks nutrients. They watered the vineyard to promote rapid growth of the buds and shoots in the initial stage (the heavy rains of December and early January this year were absorbed long ago). And they dusted with sulfur about every 10 days to prevent growth of powdery mildew, which will attack the young shoots.
The most significant activity of early spring, though, is pruning. This is a process of cutting back the canes to eliminate buds. Unless nature intrudes, it is pruning that determines the size of the grape crop.
“In grapes that are to be used for fine wine, less is more,” Peter Quimme explains in “The Signet Book of American Wine.”
“If grown in rich soil, liberally irrigated, and allowed to put out long wandering branches and every bunch of grapes it is stimulated to, the finest grape varieties would yield fruit suitable only for mediocre wine. Only if the vine’s yield is kept small by growing it in relatively poor soil, and/or by careful pruning, can the vine produce a small crop of fruit concentrated enough in flavor to produce fine, intensive wines.”
So the pruning sheers snip before bud break, but not later. One school of thought, often practiced in cooler climates, is to delay pruning as long as possible because an unpruned vine will bud later than one that has been pruned, thus providing the farmer with a hedge against frost for at least several days.
The shoots that survive continue to grow until, about 45 days after bud break, they bloom. This flowering brings forth small hard berries. If all goes well, they will begin to change color in about eight weeks, a signal that the ripening process has begun.
Out of the nursery
In the winery, meanwhile, the winter’s hibernation is ending too.
Consider the winery as a nursery. The fully grown kids have to move out, in part because the winemaker needs space and barrels for the wines born the previous fall. Other wines may be making an intermediate change from barrel to bottle, or stainless-steel tank to small oak barrel.
At Chateau Souverain, Killian said, much of the 2-year-old cabernet sauvignon has already made the transition from barrel to bottle. In early spring, however, the 1995 merlot and zinfandel will go through final blending and be bottled for release later in the year.
“Occasionally the winemaker would like to give a wine some extra time in barrel,” he said. “That can become an issue unless extra barrels have been purchased so we can keep our cycles intact. Usually we react earlier. When we sense a young merlot is very tannic or highly extracted, we can accelerate maturity by several techniques, maybe racking it an extra time.” This involves siphoning the wine from one barrel to another, leaving sediment behind.
Killian’s “cycle” calls for cleaning the freshly emptied merlot and zinfandel barrels, then filling them with the 1996 editions, which have spent the winter in larger tanks or barrels.
As to the white wines, the 1996 chardonnay and sauvignon blanc were fermented by similar techniques in the fall. But the chardonnay underwent a second, malolactic fermentation, which creates a richer, smoother, more complex wine with a buttery character. It is resting on its lees (sediment) in small wooden barrels. From time to time the lees are stirred and the barrels are “topped off” with extra wine to compensate for evaporation. It will be bottled in the summer and released in October. The sauvignon blanc, spared the malolactic and stored in older wooden barrels to preserve its fresh-fruit character, was bottled in February and awaits release in May.
Spring is responsible for one aspect of the legend of wine as a living thing. In earlier, less technologically aware, times, as the temperature rose in Europe’s caves at this time of year, wines would spontaneously begin to pop or fizz. “It lives!” bewildered peasants whispered. In fact, that activity was nothing more than the completion of a fermentation that had been cut off prematurely when the temperatures dropped in the fall.
