My name is Mitchell Klug and I’m the Vineyard Manager for Crushpad Winery. Right now, we are Coombesville area of Napa Valley in Reverence Vineyard. It’s a cabernet sauvignon based vineyard, 12 acres in the south part of Napa Valley, east of the City of Napa.
Reverence was planted in 2002, it’s entirely cabernet. And one of the other strengths of the property is that it has great diversity of clones. That provides a lot of opportunities for blending.
Some of the reasons why the Bordeaux varietals do well in this area is because there are longer season grapes. So they require a longer growing season, then some of the burgundy and Reis and Rhone varieties like Pinot Noir, Chardonnays, Syrah.
Because of the microclimates down here and the general climate in Napa Valley, we can go late into October and still have weather sufficient enough to continue the maturation process and get the fruit characteristics that we want and subsequently the wine characteristics in this Coombesville area.
Weather patterns down in this part of the valley are different. We’re in a small valley, really. And with just something as simple as looking at the berry size here versus other parts of the valley were considerably behind in berry sizing here than 10 miles north of us or 15 miles north of us in Oakville. That’s the way it tracks here all year long. But break is about a week to ten days later and it tracks all the way through bloom into harvest. It’s not uncommon at all for these varietals, these same varietals to be picked in the Coombesville area and here at Reverence in mid October.
The water holding capacity of these soils is relatively low. So even with a higher rainfall a year, once these soils start to deplete and the vines use water, water is a real key way to regulate the vine bigger, either by not applying water, irrigating or irrigating less. So as you can see, these vines express moderate to low vigor and that’s all because of the soil types. Here at reverence, the predominant rootstock used in the vineyard is 110R and that’s a Berlandieri-rupestris cross.
110R has a couple of characteristics that fit this property quite well, and that is that it’s a more drought tolerant rootstock. So understanding that these are Coberly-type soils, understanding that these soils don’t have a high water holding capacity, also understanding in the consideration of the property not having a lot of water and with Bordeaux varietals, it turned out to be I think a very good choice. This is a VSP, Vertically Shoot Positioned training system. So all of the shoots are oriented within what we call moveable wires, pairs of wires that move from about 14 inches off of the cordon up to about 6 feet tall.
Light is very important in the development of color in the fruit and it’s also very important in the development of the fertility on the wood. These shoots and these buds require light in order to maintain fertility. So if we had just a wall of leaves during the period of time a fruit bud differentiation and throughout the season, we would probably have fewer clusters and fewer berries on the cluster as a result of that. Cordon pruning is a very good way to deal with having a correct number of shoots within a certain defined area, shoots per meter or shoots per foot and for trying to obtain the capacity of fruit for the leaf surface area of a vine.
As I walk to this vineyard today, and with this basing and with the clustered numbers and where we are during the growing season, we’re rapidly approaching where we would do an estimate based on what we call lag phase which is about at the middle of the growing season. The grape growing season, if you are to graph it with the double sigmoid curve, so a little hill and then a plateau and then another hill, and that plateau is a resting phase where the grapes physiologically are getting ready to switch from the vegetative phase to the fruitful phase. So all the energy, instead of going towards developing leaves and shoots, will transition into evolving the berries and maturing the clusters. And with the cluster’s number with the canopy size, with the understanding that there won’t be significant thinning from this point forward, it looks to me like there could be somewhere between 3.25. And as much as 3.75 tons per acre here at Reverence this year which I believe follows within the historical average of this property.
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