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Notes from the Vineyard



Past "Notes from the Vineyard"


Handmade wines since 1983.

 

Notes from the Vineyard

SPRING 2001

 

Santa Barbara County is going through great changes viticulturally. In the last five years, the acreage of grapes planted has more than doubled. And while most of this acreage has been planted by the huge industrial wineries whose names we all know, there have been significant plantings by independent growers who know great wine and are developing carefully farmed vineyard sites that ultimately should produce great wine. We have been fortunate enough to meet a few of these enthusiastic new growers and to purchase their grapes, and with this newsletter we introduce a wine that is a product of these new plantings.

Since the first vines were planted in the modern era of Santa Barbara County in 1969, things have evolved. Back then the U. C. Davis mantra was to plant vines very far apart from each other because fewer vines per acre translated to lower costs. Trellising the vines was considered unimportant and, since it was also very expensive, the 'California sprawl'--where the vines grew haphazardly in any direction--was the norm.

It took pioneering work by the Australian wine industry to convince people here that there was some logic in training vines the way the French have done for a hundred years or more--so that the fruit is evenly exposed to the sun. Having a trellis that narrowed the leaf canopy and allowed in sunlight helped avoid disease problems, ripened the fruit more evenly, and improved wine quality dramatically. And it took high land prices to convince people here that planting vines closer together made more efficient use of the land. Now that we are working with these new vineyards that have three or four times as many vines per acre, we are finding vine vigor is controlled because of inter-vine competition. With grapevines, the quantity of vegetative growth (vine vigor) is very important for wine quality--less growth almost always produces superior wines.

The only down side for quality minded vintners of these new close planted vineyards is the possibility they will produce so many grapes that the flavor of the wine will be diluted; there seems to be only so much flavor a vine can pump out. But we have handled that potential problem by buying grapes by the acre instead of by the ton (which allows us to thin the crop without affecting the grower's income). One final benefit to wine quality of these new plantings is that many of them are being planted with new clonal stock from France. These new selections of our old favorites (chardonnay, pinot noir, syrah, etc.) are superior because the criteria for choosing them is wine quality rather than abundantly productivity.

And why dwell on the changes taking place in Santa Barbara County viticulture? Because, although we have had great success making wine here already, perhaps the best is yet to come. For a preview, check out our 1999 Chardonnay Clos Pepe: I think it is terrific.

Adam Tolmach