A Vineyard in Napa. Doug Shafer
his yet non ex is tent vineyard).
At the time, most vineyards were located on the valley floor, where they could be dry-farmed, because the deep, rich soils stored a good deal of moisture from the winter rains.
Our hillsides, by contrast, came with a scant eighteen-to twenty-two-inch covering of porous volcanic soil and rock over a layer of weathered bedrock. So the soil, the underlying geologic material, and the steep slopes meant that any winter rain didn’t hang around very long. By mid-to late summer the hillsides were as dry as ash, making irrigation mandatory if you wanted your vines to survive.
The secondary reason for an overhead sprinkler was the discovery—first made in orange groves—that during frost season you could protect your vines from frost damage by coating them in water and letting a thin layer of ice form around them. It’s counterintuitive, but it works, like creating a tiny igloo around each grape; the ice actually helps the vines stay above the critical temperature of 31.5 degrees Fahrenheit.
What made this approach affordable was the fairly recent introduction of inexpensive PVC pipe. Grape growers were never exactly rolling in cash from Prohibition onward, so by necessity they were always on the lookout for new ways to squeeze a penny. Previously, frost protection was performed with the use of smudge pots, basically metal chimney-type structures in which you’d burn diesel oil that created a warm, heavy, dark smoke that filled your vineyard—and the air—keeping the vines above freezing. Some growers simply burned piles of old car tires. On a frosty morning back then the Valley could be pretty smoky and smelly.
Overhead irrigation systems like ours took weeks to build, and with his engineering background I think Dad was intrigued by the calculations involved in getting the water pressure and distribution right. But rather than try to conquer this one himself, Dad hired a consultant to design and build a complex array of pumps, pipes, valves, and sprinkler heads that all connected back to our pond.
After weeks of scrupulous assembly, it was finally time to test the completed sprinkler system. Dad cranked it on and we heard an exciting swoosh of water cascading through the web of PVC pipe. Water began to first dribble out and then to shoot in streams of spray here and there and across the way as planned. There was a real sense of occasion and achievement. We were for real. We were finally in the wine business. Our crops planted (getting there), our trellises erected (sort of). This was the real beginning of—
Pow—
The sprinkler head closest to us exploded into the sky, hurled on a blast of high-pressure pond water. We were still taking that in when the next sprinkler head down the line fired into the air. Then another. And another and another. All the way down the line. Pow, pow, pow—sprinkler heads across the vineyard soared into the air like fireworks.
The sprinkler consultant had used the wrong pressure valves, and the whole thing came apart before our eyes.
With these and other setbacks, my mom started to call the vineyard site “John’s Folly.”
The final kicker came a couple of years later when Dad realized that we didn’t need an overhead sprinkler system at all. First, he learned, since the vines were on a hillside they don’t need frost protection. The frost zone exists in low-lying valleys and depressions in the valley floor, not at higher elevations. Second, the sprinklers were a terrible waste of water, dumping gallons upon gallons on the vineyard, when all we needed were small, controllable amounts. As soon as possible we switched to drip irrigation, a then-new system pioneered by the Israelis, in which you dole out micro-sips of water to individual vines.
We hadn’t started with proper deer protection. We hadn’t needed to rip the soil. We didn’t need overhead sprinklers. It seemed at this point that rather than embarking on something that had been done since ancient times, planting a hillside was some kind of exotic experiment, which left Dad feeling his way forward in the dark.
1. Aldo Delfino, Agricultural Commissioner, 1974 Napa County Agricultural Crop Report, Napa County Department of Agriculture, Napa, CA, 1975, accessed June 28, 2011, www.countyofnapa.org/AgCommissioner/CropReport.
2. Stephen J. Bardessono, Agricultural Commissioner, 1985 Napa County Agricultural Crop Report, Napa County Department of Agriculture, Napa, CA, 1986, accessed June 28, 2011, www.countyofnapa.org/AgCommissioner/CropReport.
3. Louis P. Martini, “A Family Winery and the California Wine Industry,” an oral history conducted in 1984 by Ruth Teiser, The Wine Spectator California Winemen Oral History Series, Regents of the University of California, p. 46.
4. Rootstock is a grapevine root system that you source from a specialized wine industry nursery. You plant it in the soil, get it established for a few months, and then graft on a cultivar, or cane, such as Merlot, Cabernet Sauvignon, Chardonnay, Chenin Blanc, etc. This technique of grafting rootstock to a cane was developed in France as a way of outwitting phylloxera in the 1800s. It was discovered that the root systems of some species of wild grapevines from North America were resistant to the insect, and the French vignerons realized that they could graft their French vines onto American roots and thus establish vineyards that were phylloxera-resistant. Today a wide variety of rootstocks has been developed to resist disease and to offer desired results in a variety of soil types and climate conditions.
EIGHT
Grape Future
In 1974 I graduated from St. Helena High and had to start thinking about “real life” and my future. I started paying more attention to what was going on in my dad’s world. I’d cruise up our driveway, which cut through the vineyard, and there he’d be out on a tractor—which he was still learning to operate—in jeans and beat-up hat. He’d give me a big grin and a wave, and it was hard to reconcile this image of him with the dad I’d known back in Chicago—the corporate guy in the three-piece suit. I’d never seen him so happy. Dad, his grower buddies, and the consultants he worked with would drive around the Valley in their old Jeeps and their pickup trucks and they’d talk about the weather and grapes and local politics. This way of life appealed to me a lot more than the prospects of living in a city and sitting at a desk all day.
I was accepted into U.C. Davis and signed on to major in viticulture, the science of cultivating grapes. This meant a lot of math as well as a great deal of chemistry and plant biology—the hard stuff. At the same time I enjoyed picking up the basics of pruning and trellising in the school’s teaching vineyard and reading up on the latest research on vineyard cultivation. Davis was, and is, the leading school for anyone interested in the wine business. In one or two of my undergrad classes I remember observing a group of graduate students in the front row (I was usually found in the back) asking questions, making notes, and taking things way too seriously, in my opinion at the time. It was a group that turned out to include Cathy Corison of Corison Winery, Tony Soter, Soter Vineyards in Oregon, and Richard Ward and David Graves, both of Saintsbury.
The summer after my freshman year, I secured my first winery job. It was in Calistoga working at Kornell Champagne Cellars, a producer of sparkling wines, with the unforgettable Hanns Kornell. It was my first taste of responsibility. I’d have to get myself out of bed at 6 A.M., fix my own breakfast, pack my own lunch, and blaze up Silverado Trail on the forty-five-minute trip to Kornell, arriving a little before 8 A.M. If you were even a few minutes late, Hanns would give you a blistering earful, if he didn’t simply fire you on the spot—which I saw him do a number of times.
Mine was the gruntiest of grunt jobs, made worse by the wearing of a mandated nerdy blue jumpsuit. Each day entailed jobs such as hauling hundred-pound bags of sugar into an upstairs storage area, cleaning up after another bottle of sparkling wine had exploded in the cellar, and working