The snow doesn’t give a soft white damn whom it touches. ~e.e. cummings
It is a strange day indeed. The weather has decided to do what it always does and embarrass anyone who tries to predict it. We here at Qupé are confronted on two fronts. In the mid-west our wine club members are suffering through a brutal cold front, and the wines don’t fare much better. We shipped out our first club shipment of the year and almost instantly started getting phone calls. Our shipper tried to get our wines out fast, but nature makes fools of us all, and low and behold our wines froze in transit. The calls sounded something like this:
Club Member: “Hi, I am calling from (state east of California) and I just received my wine club shipment. Thing is two of the bottles were open?”
Rob in the Tasting Room: “Let me ask you this, are the bottles really cold?
Club Member: “Yeah, how did you know?”
Rob: “Lucky guess….”
Now here is the funny part (unless you live somewhere there is a blizzard right now). Central Coast California is going through a bit of a hot spell… Now this may sound like bragging to those of you up to your chins in snow, but it is a real concern for us. At the heart of all great wine makers is a farmer, and farmers are indebted to the weather. As a farm we depend on our crop, and our crop is only happy when it gets some sleep during the winter. Nature works in cycles, times of production and times of rest. Right now we would normally be in a time of rest but nature works in accordance with all its elements, temperature included. So when in January it decides to be 65 degrees (5 to 6 degrees off our average for a year) our vines get exceptionally confused. And here comes the bad part…
When our vines fail to fall asleep, they fail to make up their mind for the rest of the year. Now all of this sounds very “holistic” but what this ultimately equates to is a question of energy. Vines have a limited amount of energy, and that energy is either spent “digging” or growing vegetation (fruit and leaves). Now the challenge of the farmer is to convince the vine to do a little of all of the above. Ultimately our goal is to convince the vine to dig deep enough to extract mineral components and other flavor compounds from the soil as well as to convince the fruit to reach high enough into the sky to express the characteristic of the grape. So this little change in the weather may (or may not) result in a change in the fruit.
The best case scenario, the vines enjoy an unpredicted “root” growth spurt. The worst case, the plants fail to sleep and spend their energy trying to grow their vines. Should this occur and there be an early season frost there is a great danger that early blooming on the vines, will result in the untimely demise of our grapes. Can you spell catastrophe? So this is the Mexican Stand Down we have. Wah, Wah, Wah, Dooh, Dooh.
Good, Bad, and Ugly the importance of weather is that we are beholden to it. We pray for it and suffer for it. It brings us the rain and the sun. It is our life and our loss. In the end our winter may be bitter, but our vintage sweet indeed. Only time will tell.
. Thank you Scott.