The Secret Life of Wine in Summer

This week in the Sonoma Valley.

The Ripening begins

Were you to walk out in the vineyards of Sonoma Valley this week you might find the first hint of treasure growing there. Hidden in shadows under the grape leaves, the grapes have begun to change color.

If you are a good treasure hunter you will notice that canopy of leaves that covers the vines are shaping and forming the light and shadows that drive the beginning of ripening. It is this week and the next two weeks or so that the grapes begin to develop the fruit flavors that will define the wines character and quality.

It is another miracle that is not totally understood, although every lab out there is generating metaphorical piles of data to track what is going on.

This week and the next two weeks are a major turning point in the life of the vineyard. Veraison is beginning. Malic acid drops away leaving tartaric acid as the predominant backbone of the acidity that you will read endlessly about when the vintage is released next year.

That is, unless of course, the wine is being stored away in barrels to age anywhere from a few months to a few years. You won’t read endlessly about the acidity of barrel aged wines for another two or three years.

As the acid goes down the sugars go up.

It’s the sugar that turns to alcohol when the grapes are pressed and fermented. It’s also the hidden sugar that most people don’t know is there that makes a lot of “dry” wines drinkable. That sugar lays just beneath the threshold of awareness and balances the alcohol, especially in the high alcohol wines of California.

You may remember earlier issues when I talked about the grapes picking up exhaust fumes from the highway, smells of rose and eucalyptus from around the vineyard, and even horse and cow manure if they are next to a farm. That all happens in this small window of 2-3 weeks as the grapes shift into maturity.

It’s happening right now.

In a month or two the grapes in my hand will be crushed and on the way to becoming sparkling wine from the 2021 vintage which, hopefully, will be remembered long after the drought the gave it birth is forgotten.

12,000 years of not-wine

The first people who lived in Sonoma didn’t drink wine.

The Pomo, the Miwok, the Patwin and the Wappo lived in and around Sonoma Valley for 12,000 years. During all that time they didn’t plant a single grape. No one knows why but it might have to do with the fact there were no grapevines in Sonoma back then.

Actually, they didn’t plant anything at all. Mostly what they did was eat acorns a lot.

Not so much munching them off the oak trees, but by crushing them into a flour and making bread. Acorn bread takes some serious work. Part of that work is leaching the tannins out of the acorns which I point out only to say, grapes aren’t the only things that develop tannins in Sonoma Valley.

I made acorn tea in a survival class one summer, but I’ve never had acorn bread. Consequently, I am at a loss for meaningful wine pairing suggestions, other than acorn bread is more like patties than bread, and it tends to char on the outside.

Maybe a lighter white or red with little or no tannin (you just got rid of the tannins to make the bread) and high enough acidity to cut the char taste. Yet, another problem the Pomo never had to worry about.

Fortunately for us, in give or take 1769, the great Catholic monk Junipero Serra started walking north from Mexico City, founding missions as he went and planting grapes around every mission he founded. Eventually he reached as far north as San Francisco (Mission Dolores).

He planted grapes everywhere he walked—he was a Franciscan and Franciscans were forbidden to ride on mules or horses unless they were more or less dying. Today, he has truck stops named after him.

Oh sure, he was the official Inquisitor of the Spanish Inquisition where ever he went, he abused and starved the native people, using them as slaves and yeah, he wore a sackcloth spiked with bristles and his nightly self flagellations with a pointy iron chain kept his fellow monks awake but hey—Pope Francis made him a Saint in 2015 because, you know, he was a swell guy.

Junipero Serra is known as the “father of wine in California”.

The Catholic monks kept founding missions right up until 1823 when they built the last one of 21 in what is the town of Sonoma today ( see photo below). By 1857 a Hungarian Count smuggled grape cuttings out of Europe and founded the first winery in California, Buena Vista—Winery #1.

Today, the winery’s still there, the mission is still there and the town that grew up around the mission is still there. You can visit them all if you are so moved.

Sonoma Valley is the actual birthplace of the California Wine Industry.

Sonoma This Week

I wandered around Sonoma Valley this week to see what kind of shape the vineyards are in as we enter the third year of severe drought.

Temperatures have gotten over 100 degrees in Sonoma in the last couple of weeks and the ground is cracking everywhere. There is only dirt in the places where water usually pools, even in summer. There are already fires up on Mt. Shasta to the north of us and you can see in the picture below that the grass on the hillsides and around the vineyards is brown and brittle.

Walking on the ground you see here in the photo is like walking on concrete.

I’m reaching under the leaves here to get that photo at the top of this page. Grapes are more like people than you might think. They easily sunburn if the canopy hasn’t been cut right —each vineyard is different. Just for starters, the sun’s at different angles in different vineyards.

Vineyards face different ways because of the sun’s path and the vagaries of dirt and microclimates. Some grapes need more sun than others. Some burn more easily than others. I was with one winery that had the vines planted the wrong way. I’m not sure what path that was, but it didn’t work out well.

Some grapes get sunlight in the morning, others in the afternoon and some just bake all day. Some vines (like Sauvignon Blanc) grow rank and thick, throwing lots of shade. Other vines (like Pinot Noir) grow tight and thinner, allowing more sunlight to reach the bunches.

Cutting and shaping the canopies shapes the shadows and the air flow both. The surface of the grape skins cool with air flow and shade, and they heat in still, open air.

Which one any given vineyards needs, depends on the land and weather around it.

A vineyard swells with life all summer. The bees hover in the grass, red tailed hawks float lazily against the blue sky and the wind rustles the grape leaves as you pass. The whole place is slopping over with life bursting through the savaged dirt of a drought that mostly kills, but for this week, gives birth instead.

The vintage remains uncertain, but if you go bump into a vine or two his week you can hold the grapes just as the wine’s life in them begins to grow. All those blueberry pie, crushed rock, fruit forward wines are just a promise now, but they are there. Rising with each passing day.

So, when you sit by the fire next winter, in thrall to those scents of roses and hints of cherry, give a thought or two to this summer, just as it is right now, when the honeyed aroma of the summer is giving birth to the dark, oak wrapped wines of winter.

It is a good time to be grateful.