It’s been almost a year since my last post in the vineyard journal. I didn’t go anywhere, I didn’t get sick, I just got busy doing farm chores around the vineyard, a whole bunch of new music, editing a large swath of tech books, spending time with my wife… you know, trying to be quiet and calm as we endure to outlast the great Pandemic.
The biggest news in the vineyard is that it has only rained 7 inches for the season and it hasn’t rained at all since April. We are in “Severe Drought” status while summer temperatures have steadily increased. The land is parched. It is dry. My own vineyard has developed oak root fungus all around the edges where the vineyard abuts the oaks whose roots are ever-searching as water gets scarcer. My vineyard has been so baked and broiled that many of the vines are dead or exhausted. Many trunks are simply bare. Every vineyard in the wine country is the same. It’s a another tough year with smaller harvests predicted. The trick this year is to get the grapes in as soon as you can. Trying for any kind of hang time seems folly to me; wine country is sitting on a powder keg and frankly the whole place could go up in flames with one mishap.
Farming in the vineyard has been a balancing act this year. First the drought. Wells are drying up and new drills with engineering are backlogged for months, forcing many to go to water witches who come and dowse their land for potential new sources. Some vineyards are actually trucking water in by tanker truck (that must be expensive). The second worry this year is tracking the smoke from the #DixieFire, the largest California wildfire of the year, the fire that continues to spew out tons of burned biomass. So far the fire is well to the northeast of us and its smoke has gone to the east, but now it’s circuling back. The wind is shifting and by the weekend the smoke begins to mix with the Bay Area fog. Its acrid smells are everywhere and soon it starts blocking the sun just when the vines are trying to ripen as fast as possible. Thirdly, the Covid variant Delta is spreading. Right at harvest time.
My vineyard has it’s own problems. Over the winter I met with the vineyard management company and we decided to shut down a struggling block high on the hill because there’s not enough water (last year we lost the entire crop because of heat and insufficient irrigation). All year we have been severely rationing water for the home and the home garden and this will be the new normal until I can get a deeper well. Or at least examine what kind of well we have and reconfigure it somehow. We also need to tear out the vines and replant with a rootstock that repels the oak root fungus. Those are big investments for a little vineyard to resource especially when everyone in this well-off valley is thinking the same thing, except on a much grander scale with deeper pockets. It’s one of the issues you face when you are a small time player.
By the way, wineries tend to use a lot of water, too. So does tourism. So do the spas and restaurants that provide the 5-star Napa experience to the tourists who are visiting the wineries and their well-watered gardens. I don’t know what the future of wine country holds but there’s only so much water. At some point we can’t be an agricultural Disneyland.
Tomorrow is August 16, marking the one year anniversary of The Hennessey Fire in 2020. It was started during the night of 10,000 Lightning Strikes and I wrote about it and what I witnessed. I’m very nervous about this anniversary because last year it marked the beginning of three months of hell like no other, a toxic mix of Covid-19, presidential politics, heat bubbles, smoke storms, and days on end without electricity nor visibility. I’m nervous we will have calamity again and I’m anticipating bad news. How can I not? The ground crunches when I walk on it. Trees are shriveling their foliage. Oak leaves are half brown and half green. And it’s only August 15th. There’s two more months of new potential heat bubbles and drought.
But August 16 comes and goes with only asingle throwback to the anniversary — it reaches 100 degrees F. The never-ending Dixie Fire up north rages on and by mid-week after the 16th the wind changes and all that smoke descends. All that smoke I remember from last year, all those overcast skies, the sun like a sci-fi red sun, the acrid taste of air, the ash-stained lines in your face caused by wearing a mask for hours. The only thing you can do is hunker down in the house and switch between your weather apps.
The vineyard managers are becoming nervous about this new smoke. They drive up and down the inner vineyard roads in their 4x4 trucks, windows down, heads hanging out, carefully watching the smoke and the large purple clusters of ripening fruit. There’s also been a lot of winery staff in masks walking up and down the rows inspecting and taking samples. For days the early afternoons contain hazy clouds that block the sun and turn the smog into a dirty yellowish white. The smoke is everywhere now and at a low enough elevation that it blankets out the sun.
Harvest has begun for the early white grapes. Flatbed trucks rumble down the roads early in the morning stacked high with white T-bins full of freshly picked grapes. Tractors travel in caravans like camels leaving plumes of vineyard dust behind them. And the early mornings have enough humidity to carry an early autumn smell. All these are tell-tale signs of harvest approaching but I struggle to understand why it doesn’t feel celebratory. Harvests use to be joyful and it doesn’t feel that way this year. Instead it feels like another thing we must go do, another obstacle towards normalcy, another risk thrown in our wake. There’s no parties this year, no parades, few get togethers. There’s no merry build-up to the long table of happy people eating and drinking, friends and families who worked the harvest and brought it in. There’s none of that this year and it’s like we’re skipping the traditions and just doing the work.
The vineyard wraps me in isolation as I count down how many days after August 16 we can make it without a climate calamity. Each day past August 16th is a ray of hope. It’s one more day towards the end of summer, one more day towards cooler weather, humidity, and maybe a chance of rain.
So far the long-range forecast gods are complying. It looks like we might make it through the week ahead without climate incident, and God willing, an uneventful harvest. So far the offshore breezes from the Pacific have kept it moderately cool and foggy with just a slight heat blip forecasted for the last weekend of August.
That blip shouldn’t be a problem for wine country but it’s going to feed a monster to the east of us: the Caldor Fire. The beast is formidable and approaching Lake Tahoe.
I shelter and work remotely the last week of August 2021 with one eye fixated on the blip.