In the Cain vineyard, this is the busiest time of the year. We have grapes, we’ve been planting, and we’re thinking about the future and what the climate will bring.
We’ve got Grapes!
This is the time of year when the vines grow most rapidly and we have the most work to do in the vineyard. By now, we’ve made it past budbreak and flowering, through the uneven weather of Spring, and now into the warmth of Summer. After healthy, but not excessive, Winter rains, budbreak came slowly and even a bit later than usual, reminding us that each year is different and almost never the same as the last year or any other. Following a relatively cool April, May warmed the vines so that flowering—a key moment in the growing season—arrived at just about the ideal time: late May/early June, which Ashley reports is average for the past 25 years she’s worked in the Cain Vineyard.
Often, we worry about the weather at flowering, because those flowers do best when it’s warm and sunny. On the North Coast, the weather in late Spring can be variable, and sometimes up on the mountaintop, we can find our vines enveloped in fog. But this year was almost perfect. I say “almost,” because the vines were almost too happy and growing so rapidly that some of them forgot to set all their fruit. A few more flowers than usual did not get fertilized, so the clusters are sometimes missing a few berries—but overall, it’s still a healthy crop. Moreover, the flowering went quickly so that the ripening will be uniform both within and between the clusters. So far, so good!
Of course, the grapes are still green. We have to wait another month to see them begin to turn purple, and then after that, more than a month before they’ve ripened and are ready to be picked. Harvest will be in September.
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We’ve been planting! And the new vines will be better than ever …
Now, there’s plenty to do. Most of the work goes into managing the growing shoots—positioning them, thinning them, sometimes pulling a few leaves, and so on. It’s gardening. We give particular attention to the baby vines—those planted over the last four years, and especially those newly planted just this year. As with all babies, it’s critical to give them a good start! Although we maintain a virtually permanent cover crop, we do clear away anything growing right next to the vine that could crowd it, compete with it, or provide cover for the little rodents that like to chew on the trunks of those babies. Then, of course, because these babies have a limited root system, it’s important to be sure that they can get enough water—especially in that first year.
The most important work in the vineyard involves selecting the strongest shoots growing in the best positions, training those shoots, and removing the shoots that aren’t needed.
We’ve been replanting the Cain Vineyard for the past four years—each year, almost 10 acres—and we’re gratified to see so many thriving young vines. Some of the vines planted in 2021 have even given us a small crop—but it’s important to remember that in those first years, our focus is to grow a strong, healthy vine, with a deep and complex root system—this will be the foundation for the decades to come. In the poor, thin, hillside soils of Cain, everything takes longer—and it’s worth it! These new vines will only come into their own after some twenty years…
I like to say that planting a grapevine is an expression of hope and faith in the future.
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Under the Summer Sun
Summer has arrived and with it, heat. Fortunately, grapevines, being a Mediterranean plant, can tolerate a fair bit of heat—up to a point. So, it’s a good time to think about the weather, past, present and future, and how we can adapt in the Cain Vineyard.
But, what will the future bring? Climatologists have been ringing alarm bells for decades, but only now is the message is finally being taken up by the mainstream media. At first it was generic, “Global Warming,” and then it became “Climate Change.” For a long time, I believed that “Climate Change” was a way to avoid stating the obvious: Global Warming, with melting glaciers and icecaps and rising sea level. However, over the past twenty years that I’ve been thinking about this, I’ve come to realize that Climate Change is a more apt description, because the most important point is that weather patterns will change and that change will not be uniform all over the planet.
For example, the far coast of California has been cooler this year, while the interior of California has been warmer. The Napa Valley sits on the cusp between these two weather patterns. The Cain Vineyard, growing at the crest of the mountain range separating Napa from Sonoma and at the highest point between Cain and the Pacific Ocean is in a particularly sensitive spot. It all depends upon which way the wind blows … literally.
Where many parts of North America have already experienced dramatic heat waves this year, here in Napa/Sonoma, we just experienced our first heat wave over the July 4th weekend. We can say that it’s a bit early, but not unprecedented.
Not only can we anticipate changes in the temperature and in which way the wind blows, we could can also foresee changes in the pattern of rainfall. The problem is that, beyond the generic pronouncements of impending drought, we don’t really know what’s in store for us specifically at each location along the North Coast of California, and even more specifically in the Cain Vineyard. That’s because we don’t yet have reliable weather models that can predict future weather patterns over years and decades. For this, we still resort to statistical climate models that are subject to many variables some of which, like ocean currents, that we’re only now learning to predict. It’s already pretty wonderful that meteorologists can predict the weather pattern two weeks ahead. When I first started working in vineyards in the early 1980’s, the norm was as much as three days advance notice, and that was good!
If all this reads like denial about Global Warming or Climate Change, as in, “more research is needed,” it isn’t. The truth is simple: the planet is warming, and the climate is changing. Because understanding weather patterns is a good deal more complicated—especially at the scale of just a few miles—a lot more needs to be learned. Major progress is being made right now. Eventually, meteorology will merge with climate science … but not yet.
In the meantime, it’s valuable to reflect on the importance of the weather, especially for farmers. Our entire food system depends upon the weather. When much of the media’s attention is given to reporting on disasters, most of us don’t think about the beneficence that Nature can also bring. Not only do farmers the world over depend upon the weather, we also would like it to be predictable, and ideally, for it to stay the same from year to year. Trouble is, that’s rarely the case.
Now however, we are primed to expect change and for that change to be uncertain and even radical. It’s an unsettling time to be a farmer. We can take nothing for granted. Nature owes us nothing. Still, in this year I take some comfort: we received about 50” of rain—about usual for Cain, and more than enough. In case you don’t know, 50” is a lot more than I experienced growing up in Seattle or what you could expect in Boston, New York, or Chicago. And the Spring brought budbreak and flowering to us at about the average time for the past 20 years. In a time when we feel that we can count on nothing, we count these things as a blessing.
While all plants and crops are sensitive to the weather, we wine lovers are highly tuned to each vintage, and thus we tend to see winegrapes as exquisitely sensitive to the weather. Let’s just say that we pay close attention.
Recently, a local wine journalist asked me what we’ve done to adapt our vineyard to the coming changes in the climate. If you’ve read me this far, you’ll know that we aren’t quite sure exactly what to expect; nonetheless, we tend to prepare for warmer and dryer.
But the main thing we’ve been doing is adapting the Cain Vineyard to existing conditions and what we’ve learned over the past two decades. I freely admit that when I arrived at Cain in 1990 and began planting in 1991 and replanting in 1996, I made mistakes— lot of them! Part of it was intentional, as we couldn’t be sure about the best rootstocks, varieties, and selections for each part of the vineyard. So, we had to try a bit of everything in order to learn what works. But part of it was pure hubris and naiveté. I had been trained at the best school of viticulture in France, and worked in one of the greatest vineyards in Bordeaux, so I thought I knew a thing or two. What I didn’t take in adequately was that the climate and soils of the Napa Valley and specifically in the Cain Vineyard are completely different than those of the Bordeaux. What was I thinking? I wasn’t!
Most importantly, in the Summer, on the North Coast of California, it doesn’t rain—ever. Moreover, except for morning fog, it’s hardly ever cloudy. This is good, because it means we have much less disease pressure than in Europe. It also means that our soils need to be able to hold enough water to carry our vines through the growing season—or else we need to irrigate. It also means that our grape clusters will get lots of Sun—possibly too much, depending upon how the vines are trellised.
For all of these reasons, the wine-growing techniques I learned in Bordeaux were wildly inappropriate here in the Cain Vineyard. But, fortunately, all the principles of viticulture that I was taught in France are equally valid here—they just need to be adapted to our local conditions. For example, we don’t want to expose our grapes to excessive sunlight. We don’t want our black grapes to cook all day under the direct rays of the hot sun, so we need to train the vines so that the leaves can shade the clusters. And we want the fruit to be higher off the ground, so they receive less heat reflected from the earth. Also, we want rootstocks that are drought tolerant. These are just a few of the most obvious differences that I did not appreciate when I arrived in the Napa Valley forty years ago.
If there is one gift from the Glass Fire, it is this: the opportunity to give back to the Cain Vineyard all that it’s taught us over the past forty years.
What with all that we’ve had to learn, we have been very lucky to have a long-term team of vineyardists, many of whom have been tending the Cain Vineyard for twenty years and more. Caring for a grapevine is not casual or temporary labor—it’s a highly developed craft that takes years to learn. And it’s even more challenging in the Cain Vineyard. We learn together, and what we have learned, call it institutional knowledge, is invaluable. This week, we’ll be celebrating José Torres, who has worked in the Cain Vineyard for more than thirty years!
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Come see all this for yourself. While we don’t have a tasting room, when possible, we are happy to welcome faithful customers of Cain to come up, kick the dirt, smell the air, and see with your own eyes what we’ve been doing in the Cain Vineyard. When you’re planning to be in our area, give us a call, well in advance, and we’ll do our best organize your visit.
Thank you for your support of our work in the Cain Vineyard.
Yours in Wine,
—Chris Howell, Wine-Grower
July 2024