Things may have seemed simple in 2019, but they were not.
After the rains of 2018, the 2019 vintage brought welcomed change. Unusually dry weather that started in mid-July helped make the harvest, at first blush, delightfully simple. The vines politely stopped growing at veraison, focusing their energy on ripening the fruit. The vineyard team was, well, in the vineyard, the work progressing quickly and efficiently. Picking, sorting, and processing seemed almost effortless. The wines made themselves.
Club events were equally agreeable. The dry ground meant we could use the new parking area without preparing for towing duty. Dodon ‘til Dusk wasn’t canceled for rain, and Alley and her mostly new service team did a remarkable job learning their roles, revising procedures to enhance the DtD experience, and making all of us feel at home.
But underlying the triumphs were hidden challenges. The 2018 growing season - with its heavy precipitation, saturated soil, early defoliation, and poor nutrient storage - had lingering effects. In 2019, canes, buds, and the vineyard floor still contained high levels of residual fungal pathogens. Average low temperatures were higher than normal, limiting the number of “chill hours” (the number of hours the vines are exposed to temperatures between 32 degrees and 45 degrees F) that are required to break dormancy. The consequences were bud failure, excessive shatter (when the new seeds are not fertilized), and isolated bunch rot in the period before harvest, despite the near-perfect weather.
Still, the vintage proved exceptional. Although yields were low, about 20% less than usual, the quality of the harvested fruit was outstanding. The wines are continuing their annual trend toward greater depth and complexity, consistent with the increasing age of the vines. These characteristics were enhanced by long maceration times, allowing us to extract the full range of flavors. The Sauvignon Blanc and Rosé will soon be bottled; we are thrilled with them.
Lessons Going Forward
For the past year and a half, we’ve focused on understanding why 2018 was so damaging and on how we can be better prepared for the future. Our path to greater resilience involves two courses of action. First, we need to become more flexible in our harvest and winemaking strategies, such as when to pick early and make Rosé, when to alter our usual extraction processes, and what to do when we get caught with less than perfect fruit. We now have written protocols with criteria for their use for each of these situations.
We are also making fundamental changes to our vineyard practices. Because of my background in medicine and immunology, as I read more about the underlying science, the central concepts have emerged with clarity. While our farming has always been at the forefront of sustainability, 2019 is the year we hastened the pace of Dodon’s ecological approach to farming.
Throughout the vintage, we invested heavily in a set of practices that focus on improving soil, enhancing biodiversity and ecosystem services, and enriching the health, vitality, and resilience of the plants. Many of the techniques that we’ve adopted are the natural extension of our past effort to mimic natural processes, but our new focus centers primarily on soil and soil biology.
Soil with structural integrity, a diverse microbiome, and high levels of organic matter carries out many vital functions. It provides essential support for plants, protects against both drought and flood, removes environmental toxins, and improves water quality. Particularly important in today’s world, soil stores large quantities of carbon – more than twice the amount found in the atmosphere. Putting more carbon in soil will play a crucial role in addressing the underlying cause of climate change.
Healthy soil is the result of the biological interaction between plants and microbes. Just like the microvilli of the human intestine, roots are the mechanism that plants use to take in nutrients. As in humans, a balanced diet is essential for plant health. The best diets come from rich topsoil with good nutrient and water holding capacity, characteristics that allow the plants to produce complex phytochemicals that improve their structural integrity and strength, promote disease resistance, and enhance flavor.
Microbes – protozoa, fungus, bacteria, and archea – play several crucial roles in healthy soil. First, they decompose organic matter and secrete organic acids that breakdown rocks, releasing nitrogen, phosphorous, sulfur, and other nutrients that can be absorbed by plants, and they enhance water regulation by producing glycoproteins that improve soil aggregates.
Roberto and Tom construct a Johnson-Su bioreactor, a type of static, aerobic composter.
Second, beneficial microbes compete with pathogens for nutrients, secrete antimicrobial compounds and lytic enzymes that inhibit pathogen growth, and boost plant systemic host defense by stimulating production of phytochemicals. The result is an environment known as disease-suppressive soil that protects plants from pathogens.
The devil, of course, is in the details. There isn’t a textbook on ecological vineyard systems that translates these concepts into methods to create healthy soil, and only a few peers in the industry have taken this approach. The closest techniques are those used in biodynamics, but the supporting science for this very specific set of practices isn’t yet well-developed. As a result, we looked instead to other agricultural, natural, and scientific systems – everything from forestry to paleopedology (the study of soils from past geological eras) – and to our own property, where native grape vines live and thrive in the woods, not the pastures.
Turnips have a deep taproot that breaks up compaction.
Reasoning that grape vines would likely be healthiest in a forest-like setting supported by nutrients and microbes that are common in that ecosystem, we decided to emphasize growth of diverse fungal species that prefer woody food sources. Our compost program now emphasizes wood chips, and we’ve constructed a static, aerobic composter inoculated with soil from the woods just outside the vineyard. We hope that this compost will contain native mycorrhizal fungus species that will interact with the vines to produces better soil, healthier plants, and better fruit.
Because different plants provide diverse nutrients to soil microbes, we’re also working to enhance plant diversity within the vineyard. One method is to use highly heterogeneous cover crops. Our mix this year included eleven different species of grasses and forbs. A custom-made roller crimper has helped as well. When perennial grasses are mowed, hormonal signals stimulate regrowth. In contrast, crimping tall grasses terminates their growth and allows other plant species to flourish. Crimping also provides a mulch layer, cooling the soil to provide a better environment for fungal growth.
Crimping enhances plant diversity and cools soil.
Will these methods work? The conventional wisdom that vines need to struggle to produce the best wine gives pause to many of our colleagues, but it does not convince me. It’s true that overly vigorous vines with abundant foliage produce wines that lack structure and taste “green” from too many methoxypyrazines. The question is whether this vigor is produced by healthy soil with high levels of organic matter, or whether it is more likely to occur in unhealthy soil exposed to excess mineral nitrogen and phosphorous from fertilization, tillage, or excess rain.
Recent research from Germany suggests that vines raised in healthy, microbially active soils have smaller shoots, lower pruning weights, and fewer leaf layers, all signs of reduced vigor, as compared to conventionally grown grapevines. Perhaps in this context, “struggling” refers to the appearance of small, contained vines focused on reproduction and not vines struggling to feed a depleted microbiome by producing excess foliage.
Our practices are supported by research published over the past decade in scientific journals like Cell, Science, and Nature. They are based on cutting edge research and represent a significant departure from standard viticulture. After 30 years away from the lab, it’s fun to again read journals that formed the foundation of my scientific career.
But the reality is that the methods we are adopting are not new at all. Nature had a pretty good system before Thomas Jefferson invented the moldboard plow, Robert Koch developed germ theory, and Norman Borlaug initiated the green revolution. While these innovations resulted in robust increases in food production and saved billions of lives, they are also associated with degraded soil, reductions in nutrient density, and increasing input intensity. By looking to the past, new science that reintegrates ecology into the toolbox may move agriculture into a safer, more resilient, and healthful future.
We do not yet know which specific practices will be the most effective in the vineyard, but it would be folly to keep doing the same things as in the past. We are heartened by the support of our wine club members and a few leaders of the wine industry. It is indeed both exciting and daunting to be redirecting our growing strategies, and we welcome your feedback.
The final story of 2019 vintage is thus a tale of two vintages. The first – simple, unchallenging, straightforward – reminds me of an Ignaz Pleyel flute concerto, extraordinarily popular during Pleyel’s lifetime but which have become obscure with time. The second vintage - more scientifically and intellectually demanding - is reminiscent of Mozart’s Flute Concerto No. 1 in G major. Composed shortly after he had been dismissed from the Viennese court, this concerto represents the rebellious defiance of defeat that eventually thrust Mozart to the pinnacle of classical music.
The challenges of the 2018 vintage proved to us that simply sustaining the status quo would not be enough to withstand the consequences of the rising temperatures and extreme weather events that scientists predict for the future. Rather, we are convinced that restoring a functional ecosystem represents the best path forward in terms of wine quality, as well as environmental stewardship. Stay tuned as 2020 unfolds, and we learn more.