State vineyards get through a nasty winter

Published 9:00 pm Saturday, August 14, 2004

Washington’s 2004 grape harvest is but a few weeks away, and it’s a good time to assess this particular vintage and also appreciate the agricultural aspect of this fickle and phenomenal product.

This past vintage year has presented many challenges with regard to vineyard sites around the state. The Walla Walla appellation was hit hard with two brutal bouts of cold temperatures that all but decimated many vineyards. Just after the 2003 harvest there was a scary Halloween freeze that resulted in some vine damage, because they still contained some sap.

This is certainly frightening to vineyard owners and winemakers because this type of damage can take years to recover. The vines not lost to this early frost were tenderized and made more susceptible to further damage from an Arctic blast that came along in January, with temperatures plummeting into the teens.

The Walla Walla valley is, in effect, one big geological bowl, where cold temperatures will sink and dwell, particularly at the low-lying or flat vineyard sites. Here, there was further vine damage and primary bud damage that spelled doom for multiple vines and vineyards.

That was the bad news. The good news is that it’s not as bad as the infamous freeze of 1996 that wiped out a huge chunk of the state’s vineyards. Some of the more savvy grape growers learned from that experience and took precautions against a similar outcome. Chistophe Barron of Walla Walla’s Cayuse Winery, for example, went through the tenuous and tedious task of burying the canes of his vines to protect them from the frost. This worked well and Cayuse should have a banner vintage as a result.

Walla Walla wasn’t the only area hit hard with the double whammy freeze this winter. Most vineyards around the Tri Cities suffered sizeable damage, as did parts of the Columbia and Yakima Valleys.

As gloomy as that all sounds, the harvest of 2004 should actually shape up to be another in a string of excellent vintages. “How can that be?” you may be asking. Well, the fact is, that Mother Nature and the perseverance of the industry have made up the difference. There may have been damage to the primary buds, but nature’s back-up system of secondary and tertiary buds pushed through to produce fruit. And new vineyards planted years before came on line in areas not as affected by the freezes to help off set the losses.

My friend John Bell, who’s always a high quality source of illumination, sums up his take on the 2004 vintage, “It will be different this year for many small, independent winemakers like myself as far as where we source our fruit. Some of the vineyards that I relied on in the past lost their entire crop, so I looked for other opportunities from different vineyards. It’ll be tough to source fruit from Walla Walla vineyards because whatever fruit does come out of that part of the state will go to the estate wineries first, and then most of the rest will go to the old guard wineries such as L’Ecole 41 and Woodward Canyon. But, one of the really neat things about the Washington wine scene is that so much is built on relationships and those relationships can many times save the little guy,” Bell said. “For me, the 2004 vintage is shaping up to be a very exciting challenge for which I feel very confident. I think the amount and quality of the fruit that I get this year will be on par with previous years. In fact, I think it may be similar to the 1998 harvest which showed ripe, jammy, extracted fruit.”

The extraction of fruit, which John referred to, is mostly due to another anomaly of the 2004 vintage. The abnormally warm early spring we had this year resulted in an extremely early bud break, up and down the West Coast. This made for long and hot growing season and what appears to be a record early harvest.

“We just might be pulling some fruit in by the end of August,” Marty Clubb, owner and winemaker of L’Ecole 41, told me recently.

That’s what makes this whole wine thing so cool. You just don’t know what you’re going to get, after all, and we have to periodically remind ourselves that wine is an agricultural product and not a concocted beverage (white zinfandel not withstanding). So, the state of the state of Washington wine for the upcoming 2004 harvest seems to be in fine shape as a whole, given the early scare. It appears the string of excellent vintages continues.

Jeff Wicklund, wine consultant and writer, is the proprietor of Colby Hospitality in Everett. He can be reached at 425-317-9858, or wick@colbyhospitality.com.