AUTHOR: Dave McIntyre TITLE: The Many Moods of Mother Nature DATE: 9/01/2006 09:42:00 PM ----- BODY:

As I write this, Ernesto is pounding the Mid-Atlantic region. I haven’t talked to any winemakers in Virginia, where the best wine regions were supposed to get up to 6 inches of rain today, but I suspect they may be relieved as the storm tracked a little further east than expected. So now I wonder if it will spin out to sea and head up to Long Island, which received several days of steady rain last year just as many wineries were preparing to harvest their Merlot. Let’s hope not. For the past few weeks, we had little or no rain, warm but not real hot days, and unusually cool nights. Not great pool weather for August, but excellent conditions for growing wine grapes. The temperature variations from the hot afternoon to the cool early morning are ideal for ripening grapes and retaining acidity to give the wines structure and vibrancy. But what Mother Nature gives, she can take away. Strong winds and rains right at harvest time are never good; they are not necessarily destructive, however, if the next few days return to the favorable weather pattern. Then, as long as the grapes don’t swell up and burst, they may recover quite nicely. Since Ernesto seems to be less fearsome than forecast, he could even turn out to be a blessing, if any grapes were stunted by the drought of the past several weeks, these rains might stimulate the final ripening process. But this is my idle speculation. I tend to think of weather patterns in terms of how they affect the wine harvest. Pretty pathetic, eh? And of course we oenogeeks tend to think of California as immune from the vagaries of weather. Not so, the weather is just different there. The heavy rains come not right before harvest but when the vines are dormant, much more favorable. But this year, California felt Nature’s intense stare with a heat wave in July that pushed temperatures well over 100 degrees F for 11 days in a row, with two of those days reaching 115 degrees - at least in the Dry Creek Valley, where I visited in August. The heat was most intense in the late afternoon. The effects of such intense heat? Sunburn, literally. The grapes, which had not quite reached veraison, the point where they turn from green to golden or black, are stunted from the heat and wither. But of course this is an uneven process. As Andrew Forchini, grower at his family’s winery on the east side of Dry Creek, explained, the sides of the vines facing the afternoon sun were most affected by the heat. He showed us vines that were shriveled and worthless on the west side, but still holding gorgeous, full fruit on the other side. So the extent of the sunburn depends on the orientation of the vine rows and the leaf canopy. Growers can moderate the effects with irrigation, but only so much when the heat is that intense. In short, yields may be down a bit because of the heat, but quality should not be affected. Forchini shrugged off the losses as he tasted some of the healthy grapes that would go into his family’s Zinfandel and Cabernet Sauvignon. Other growers on the west side of Dry Creek told me they were not greatly affected by the heat wave, because their vineyards are on east-facing slopes and therefore shielded from the afternoon sun by mountains to the west. So there you have it - another reason not to buy into any broad generalization about weather and its effect on a particular vintage.

----- COMMENT: AUTHOR: Chris Castanes DATE:9/01/2006 09:49:00 PM Ernesto did give us much needed rain, but almost ruined my holiday weekend.
Enjoy the wine. ----- --------