A Reflection on 2020 at Gantz Family Vineyards

Pinot Noir at Gantz Family Vineyards. Image courtesy of AldenAlli.

‘Tis the season to reflect on 2020, and what a year it was! There is so much we could talk about, but we’ll confine ourselves to the year in farming. Farming, like life, is full of ups and downs, and 2020 seemed to provide both ups and downs in abundance.

For us, the year started on a very positive note, as we rekindled our relationship with Dan Kosta. We started our farming career by selling our first harvest (2013) to Kosta Browne Winery, then one of the top Pinot Noir producers in the world. Dan Kosta and Michael Browne created an amazing brand, treated us as partners and family and we always felt incredibly fortunate to be a part of their vision. After six wonderful years, Dan and Michael went on to other projects and ultimately so did we. So, starting anew with Dan and his team, including winemaker Shane Finley, and their AldenAlli project felt like a homecoming and has made us very happy!

AldenAlli and Gantz Family Vineyard teams. Image courtesy of AldenAlli.

For 2020, and hopefully into the future, our grape purchasing partners are AldenAlli and Lombardi Wines, our old friends and fellow Kosta Browne alums, Tony Lombardi, and his winemaker, Cabell Coursey. Being back among friends was a great way to start the farming year, and 2020 unfolded wonderfully. One of the exciting things about working with new people is that you see your vineyard and farming practices through new eyes, which allows you to revisit past practices and learn. Cabell had said that he established an “area of focus” each year, picking one part of his practice to focus on and seek to approve, which seemed to us to be a great idea. So, we began the year with a commitment to focus, with our vineyard manager Jim Pratt, operations manager Jose Cervantes and their team, on our irrigation strategies in an attempt to improve grape quality. The year was unfolding beautifully with a good (but not excessive) crop and great conditions.

Then came August, usually a time when most of our farming work is done, and we are simply (impatiently) waiting for harvest. In the predawn morning of August 16, Celeste and I were awoken in the middle of the night by a huge lightning storm that lit up the sky all around us. It was beautiful and awesome, but unbeknownst to us, it and other lightning storms that night were responsible for starting hundreds of fires in both Northern and Southern California (over much of the Western United States, in fact), which burnt over the next few weeks. While it was uncomfortable here for a while, the biggest consequence was a temporary one—the area was blanketed with smoke for a month or two. All that smoke was a game changer for us.

Smoke contains phenols (specifically guaiacol and 4-methylguaiacol, among others) which in higher concentrations contribute to smoky flavors in wine. Interestingly, they are also present in toasted oak barrels, and contribute to the appealing flavors attributed to wine aged in oak. Definitely a case of too much of a good thing. These flavor compounds are absorbed into the grapes through the skin and can result in a condition in the finished wine called “smoke taint,” which is pretty much exactly what it sounds like.

So, after the smoke cleared (so to speak), we met with our winemaking partners to consider what should be done, and decided on a testing strategy to determine whether the smoke taint phenols were present in our grapes. And, it turns out, they were.

“...Grape growing and wine making are endeavors where good enough is never OK, and continued improvement, learning and commitment to excellence are key. ”

— Clay Gantz

You might imagine that, at that point, the question of what to do about it became a matter of great debate. Not having a crop for 2020 affects us, of course, but it also affects our winemaking partners because it means no revenue from wine sales for that vintage. But the decision was easy. Our goal as growers and our partners goals as winemakers is to make incredible wine, and the risk that wine made from our 2020 vintage might not be incredible was enough for all of us to quickly conclude that we should sit out the 2020 vintage.

Through this all, we were reminded that grape growing and wine making are endeavors where good enough is never OK, and continued improvement, learning and commitment to excellence are key. Second, we learned that who your partners and whether or not you and they have shared standards and goals is critical. We are so happy to be partners with AldenAlli and Lombardi, and to learn that our goals are aligned. We know that we will be able to do it again, with better results. Third, we found out that the old saws about agriculture being a risky business are true. While we didn’t have pestilence, we did have fire and plague (COVID, anyway) and the damage visited on our community from this 1-2 punch is real.

Sitting at home in the Russian River Valley today, you would have to look hard to see any evidence of the fires. The air is clear and the fall weather is lovely. Once the COVID vaccine is widely available and you are ready to travel again, we want to let you know that the Russian River Valley is here waiting for you, as beautiful as ever and full of people dedicated to doing whatever it is they have chosen to do as well as humanly possible. We and our friends will be here ready to greet you! And, let’s hope 2021 is better than 2020! Happy New Years and best wishes to all of you!

Gantz Family Vineyards. Image courtesy of AldenAlli.

Continuing Grower Education with UC Davis

Clay Gantz (right) with Dr. Kaan Kurtural, assistant Cooperative Extension specialist in viticulture at UC Davis

It has been over eight years (can you believe it?) since Celeste and I planted our vineyard in the Russian River Valley. While I can’t count the number of things I’ve learned in that time, I was nevertheless intrigued when I received the announcement for a four-day UC Davis course on grapevine production. It seemed like a wonderful opportunity to get caught up on the current science of grape growing and winemaking, and also I hoped that the course would help me pull together some of the disparate threads of knowledge if gathered over the past eight years. Sort of a “unified theory of grape growing.” My enthusiasm grew when my daughter, Angelina, expressed interest in attending the course with me.

Our classmates seeing a pruning machine in action at UC Davis’s experimental vineyard in Oakville.

We split our time between a hotel conference room in Napa and UC Davis’s experimental vineyard in Oakville, driving daily from our home in the Russian River Valley. Unfortunately, our time in the vineyard was cut in half by the unrelenting torrential rain that week. The course was a nice mix between presentation of the results of cutting-edge academic research by professors and researchers and talks and demonstrations of the practical application of that research to day-to-day grape production.

Several things stand out to me as valuable take-aways:

In the academic world, climate change is treated as a given, and people have long since moved on from debating whether it is happening or why to how are we going to deal with its consequences, in this case in the world of viticulture. A lot of time was spent discussing how to mitigate the impacts of the effects of climate change (e.g., increased heat during the growing season) through changes to our vineyard design and farming practices.

The related question of how to farm effectively in an era of diminishing resource availability (e.g., less water, less energy and less labor) was also a unifying theme. Topics such as using various technologies to make better irrigation scheduling decisions, recent developments in mechanical pruning, leafing and harvesting and their impact on grape quality, how to best monitor and correct for nutrient deficiencies and current developments in integrated pest management (e.g., using natural predators to control pest infestations) were all interesting and highly relevant.

Also, the use of new technologies, such as drone mounted remote sensors to quickly and accurately monitor vine nutritional status over an entire vineyard, will make current operations much more efficient and cheaper.

Also, I’d say that if you ever get the chance to spend time with farmers, take it. They are generally wonderful people. Ultimately, I treasured the opportunity to spend time with Angelina, exploring the complex world of wine grape farming.