August 2019
I live in a vineyard, not a winery, but a working vineyard. Grapes are grown and sold to a winery down the road. I don't do the farming, pruning, watering, or harvesting. All of that is done by a vineyard management company (read real farmers). I get to pay the mortgage and watch what others are doing and what happens around the vineyard.
It's a small five-acre plot in Oakville, California, right in the middle of Napa Valley. The vineyard surrounds a small house on three sides (the house came first) with the fourth side being the long driveway that winds down to Silverado Trail, a busy roadway, and one of two roads that stretch up and down the long and narrow valley from Napa to Calistoga.
My wife and I have here been for over twenty-five years. We bought the tired farmhouse property in 1997 without really knowing what we were doing or what we were purchasing. Now Oakville may be the Grand Cru of America but for the first three years of living in Napa Valley all I did was haul junk and piles of trash off the property and fill the local landfill. The previous owners I think just opened the back door and threw things out. There were burial spots all over the property with trash, mounds of empty glass bottles, piles of lumber, and saved boards for god knows what project, now all half rotted. The washing machine and dryer were located outside the house in a flimsy steel storage building, the kind you store the lawn mower and rakes in. We called it the Mouse House because of its many residents – you would go outside with a hamper full of clothes and have to wipe the mouse crap off of the top of the washer. (That didn't last long.)
There was poison oak everywhere and I got it so often that I had a special drawer in my bureau that held old pajama tops and bottoms that I could wear at night to soak up the oozing juice while I slept and then wash them the next day. After all these years I can catch poison oak from handling rocks that may have touched poison oak roots or branches somewhere in their recent rock history.
The house was in the style my wife and I call Appalachian Chalet, a combination of white trash and A-frame Norwegian. Everything was done on the cheap and the previous owner, a five-foot-high ex-Navy sailor, who married a Japanese women right after WW2, must have built special doors and showers because the shower head sprayed me directly on the chest and you had to duck a lot through certain doorways. Everything was covered with 1970s wood paneling and the original shag, yes, shag carpeting. I think Avocado was the original color scheme but though the years it became the hue of an aging avocado on the kitchen countertop.
And there was no vineyard. That came four years after we moved-in when I got tired of trying to mow the large fields around the house and said, “You know, we’re in Napa, maybe we should lease the land.” So I asked our neighbors the Pina brothers and we signed a vineyard contract. The tractors and bulldozers that the Pina’s are so famous for came in and the next thing you know the house became surrounded by a vineyard in three blocks (sections of a vineyard). The place was starting to look pretty chi-chi for a poison oak white trash chalet.
The vineyard is west-facing and sits in well-drained meta-volcanic soil. It tends to have foggy mornings and very hot afternoons. Cabernet vines are planted on four-foot rows, with a double-wire trellis system. Drip-irrigated, water from a well is pumped up to a holding tank, using solar power (starting in 2008). Gravity feeds the water back down to the vineyard and house. We are on the east side of the valley, near Silverado Trail, the last vineyard in Oakville as you travel north and approach the Rutherford appellation.
We really didn't know what we were doing. I worked at Adobe Systems at the time, down in Silicon Valley, and I got a bunch of stock. We bought the Farm with plans to use it as a rental or cater parties for weddings and the such. That never happened. After about two weeks we didn’t want to leave. And to this day we haven’t left and we have never rented the vineyard's house and lands for anything other than grape-growing.
Last year, some of my Silicon Valley workmates came up to Pat’s Fabled Vineyard and they enjoyed themselves and you could see the worries drain out of them in an hour or so. The view, the peacefulness, it all made them different workmates, not the ones I was used to but more relaxed. One suggested I should write a book about living in a vineyard since I'm a professional book editor. The idea stuck. After a few failed attempts I changed to sitting on the porch in the open air at a small table. Low and behold, this year’s journal in a vineyard started in August 2019, a day so hot I went and hid in a bedroom of the farmhouse known for its cooler temperatures and began this year-long adventure. It's August 2019. Hi, I live in a vineyard.
Aug 15-22, 2019
My first heat bubble lasts four days. We use to call them heatwaves but this bubble thing means it sticks around, doesn’t move, and seems to grow all around you. It went up to 104 degrees for three days in a row but during evening it was down to 55 degrees. A spread of fifty degrees and very typical of NorCal summer spreads!
The vines tolerate this weather. At some stage heat systems shut down but the heat is just another form of a stress inducer that makes grapevines put their energy into the fruit and seed – thus improving the quality of the fruit. Pruning, watering, thinning, these are all other stress inducers to push the vine into putting energies to the fruit. That is what gardeners do, manipulate plants to do something they want. Here the vineyard managers train the vine to grow in a certain fashion putting its energies into the fruit clusters in a manner befitting the vine’s varietal and location (fertility of soil, etc.).
The vines may tolerate the afternoon heat, the place was vacated. The car caravans taking vineyard workers home had left a few hours ago. It was so hot even the tourists were scarce. All my finches were very active. So I put some seed in their feeder and within minutes every one had to come see. They seem to float on the heat and be more buoyant! They played and sang with all the vigor of a kindergarten recess.
The other abundantly moving things are the Gecko lizards that run across the rocks at great speeds on the edges of the vineyard, solar turbos on, or perhaps the rocks are so hot it makes them fly by like wild toy race cars. By the end of the day my cat is exhausted.
This heat simply drives you inside. We can make all the electricity we need with our solar collectors on the roof, running the heat pump in reverse and cooling the house down to 75 degrees. But you have to stay inside. It’s just too hot. You watch TV or you read in bed, you lie awake worrying about the animals, you take a shower and step outside to dry your hair faster than a New York minute, or you find a spot and sit and watch the vineyard grow because that’s what it is doing. It is growing, right in front of you, and you can sit and watch the sun directly power the building of something not there before: clusters of new grapes and green swaying canopies of canes with that recognizable grape leaf. The sun is building the whole thing.
I’ve always been intrigued that you never see anything grow. You see the result everywhere but not the actual time-lapse growing thing. You live in this constantly changing world but you never see it grow into place. Isn't that odd? The whole world grows, constantly, and you're sitting there living in a timeline totally unrelated. Vineyards are like kids in that suddenly they’re full-grown and you can’t remember seeing much inbetween.
The morning is indicating a hot day but the air has this strip of humidity! It’s mid-summer and has been seasonly warm so far, and now suddenly it’s a strange combination of Bay Area fog and Central Valley heat. Weather is getting so weird lately. While there is often morning fog that carries moisture it burns off by mid-morning and you can tell how hot it is going to be by looking across the valley for a haze of moisture. If the view across the valley is crystal clear it’s going to be hot without any moisture to cool it down. This morning, right now as I write this, there’s both fog plus some various clouds, both high and low ones, as well as the haze across the valley. It’s a moisture you can see – white and grey with twirls blue, and it’s so dramatic I simply stop writing and take notice to the welcome relief to the blazing sun. Generally, a few days of humidity in late summer can signal a rare Napa event, heat lightning and dangerous wildfires, but none are forecasted with this abnormal morning weather.
A few hours after I wrote that, the moisture departed. Winds came down from the north and blew it all away. In a few minutes it's ten degrees hotter. It’s back to that dry warm weather when I can sit at my writer’s desk and watch the twirling dust devils rise and fall out on the valley floor.
A huge, magnificent owl visited the house garden on Sunday morning. Early at dawn I caught glance of the mighty warrior sitting inside a somewhat smallish-looking bird bath. It was the bird bath that I put out for the finches, not the two larger ones I put out for the other birds and the occasional raptor, like Mr. Owl sitting in his dainty bowl.
The owl looked like a worn gladiator with feathers dirty and matted from oak-tree sap and with one eye closed and swollen. My wife and I were inside, she with the binoculars, standing behind a glass door in our morning underwear as we watched from perhaps 50 feet away. "He's cleaning," my wife said authoritatively, using the male pronoun. She didn't offer the binoculars. Then she started to describe the "hurt" eye and I tuned out not wanting to hear about trouble or suffering in the animal world. The owl was purposely splashing water, albeit somewhat muddy by now, upon the affected eye. Then it lifted itself upon a pair of huge wings, like the hands of God reaching down and lifting spirits upwards. I changed the filthy water in the birdbath later, looking for maybe a feather left behind. Instead I decided on a new name for the Great Horned Owl: One-Eyed Jack.
August 23-30
With global climate change, the heat seems harder, almost vicious, and more frequent. That bubble of last week decided to become a heat ballon, and it’s been here all week. Several times a day I visit my mobile weather app to see if the forecast has changed. It hasn’t. The little app says more heat for more days for more in a row. Maybe its wrong and if I stare at it someone in central ops will change the forecast... but it doesn’t happen. If anything, the app shows incremental increases. But even more insane are the number of tourists seeking relief from the city and driving around in circles looking for a cool cellar. (Do not buy good wine and put it the trunk and drive around Napa in 100 degree weather looking for more wine to buy. Don’t ship it either. Buy locally in the summer at your favorite refrigerated store… go to wineries in the fall, winter, and spring.)
Things seem to get stuck in patterns now and you tend to remember only the bad patterns, like how Northern California is stuck now with a large high pressure sitting over the hot landmass stopping the on-shore flow of cool Pacific air. It twirls and spins all the hot air over the Nevada deserts instead of those cool ocean breezes. It’s like opening the engine hood of a car that’s been running for the past hour. The blast lasts for days, seemingly weeks.
A few years ago, during the Atlas Peak firestorms, it seemed the entire September and October were stuck in this off-shore flow. And several years ago it happened in February, when the entire month was dry as a bone, and hot, and the vines budded three weeks early. (That February hot spell was the final straw for me and climate change. I was a believer before but that made me adamant.)
Several years ago, right at the end of summer, we went into the off-shore heat and circling meteorological thing and I didn't know how we were going to make it until the November rains, two months away. I drove up to Napa from my Silicon job, unpacked the pets and kids, emptied the van, and turned the systems on. No water. I checked the breaker box and it was off (maybe it’s this panel, it’s so old), but every time I flipped the breaker, it broke the circuit. No water. Something was going on at the pump.
There wasn't a drop of water anywhere. I checked the pump down at the bottom of vineyard block #1 and got a few buckets from what was in the lines, that I reserved in various containers, so I could at least flush the toilet a few times. There were a few bottles of spring water to drink, and of course, there was wine.
I called the vineyard management company that tends the vineyard and talked to the water systems guy. He came over and together we went over to the pump, took off some electric box covers, and turned things off and on. "It's the pump," he said. "Your water table is below the pump. It tries to turn on but shuts off when there's no water detection."
"The well is dry?"
"I think so. It could be a malfunctioning pump, but we should get a little dribble or two. I don't know. Let's call Oakville Pump and put a camera down and see what's happening. But that will probably be next week sometime..."
I went back to the house and we put ourselves on water rations with some added toilet rules. Let's last the weekend and then we'll leave. I put some empty trash cans in the pickup truck and would go out tomorrow morning and search for some temporary water. We have a spa membership, so swimming and bathing can be done there everyday. But I was worried about the vineyard and our gardens in this heat..
And then, that very night, while deep in REM driftness, there was an earthquake.
"It was big, like a 6.5 or something," my wife said, perturbed that I slept through it, and that my response upon being awoken: "Must not have been very big." But it was a large one and crumbled several old wineries and many barrel racks with hundreds of laden barrels. It was a good thing it was a night earthquake or else many winery workers and winemakers would have been hurt by cascading, falling barrels each weighing 200 pounds.
And by some kind of miracle, we suddenly had water. Plenty of it. One day we had a dry well and the next we had an earthquake and plenty of water. Turns out the water tables changed on a lot on homesteads and vineyards throughout the valley, some losing water who once had it, and some finding their pumps in collapsed wells that got fixed, like me, thanks to mother nature. But it still amazes me to this day these events happened in the same weekend, a day apart. No water, then lots of water. All by an act of God, an earthquake near my vineyard. To this day I think the odds were incalculable.
Climate change means more dry wells and I'm worried about water. We need a water catchment system that diverts and stores rain water and we need to catch rain (I love that phrase) on every building roof on the property. I'm sure we could catch and store 20000 galloons. I'm convinced it’s what every farm and ranch in the entire world must do.