Vineyard owners hope wet winter leads to an excellent vintage of wine
NAPA -- After struggling through years of drought stressed grapes, Napa Valley vintners are hoping this winter's rainfall will be the harbinger of an excellent vintage of wine.
"You know, in 2017 we had something very similar," explained Rod Santos, General Manager at William Harrison Vineyards & Winery. "We had a very wet winter after five years of drought."
Like other growers across California's wine region, Santos is waiting for the season to bust out of the dormant vines.
"Got little nodules here where green vines will pop out," he said, examining the vines.
And after three short, dry seasons, he's hoping wine country is about to bust out of the drought.
The biggest issue for us, not only as growers but as winemakers, is that the last three vintages have been very short," Santos said.
But for winemakers, and their vines, it's not quite as simple as rainfall totals. A lot of that water has to make it to the right place.
"You look at the reservoirs around the state, they're filling up," he explained. "That's all good news, but the reservoirs are really for drinking water. We need the water to penetrate the earth. We've had three very dry years. So to get out of that the water really needs to get below the soil down where the roots of the vines go to look for their water. In a perfect world, we would not use any water on the surface.."
Effectively, winemakers are trying to make up three years in one blockbuster winter.
"Yeah, I mean it's hard to do," Santos said of the challenge. "Although we've had a lot of water this year."
The rain means less pressure to deliver water to parched vines, and it could not only change the size of the harvest, but the taste as well.
"I think what it does is it relaxes the vines," Santos said. "They know they're not going to be as stressed looking for water. So they'll tend to give us more fruit, as you expect. More water equals more juice. But also, if it doesn't get too hot, they tend to give us a little juicier flavors and a little easier to drink wine. It's farming. At the end of the day, the wine business is all about the farm.
So there's hope that one blockbuster winter can assuage the drought stress for these vines, and hasn't California earned that over the past three years.
