nderson Valley vintners celebrated their annual Pinot Noir Festival on the weekend of May 16-18 with the usual gusto – and a palpable sense of relief. Hard frosts in March, April and May hit local vineyards hard, and the rainy season ended abruptly in February, months earlier than normal. But the festival weekend was sunny and unusually warm, and the vines were already working to catch up after a cold, slow start to their growing season.

The sold-out event included more than 40 wineries pouring more than 80 Pinot Noirs from the Anderson Valley appellation (not including two wines from a sub-appellation, Mendocino Ridge). Visitors also enjoyed good food, live music and a charity auction.

The wines demonstrated yet again the valley’s rapid evolution, from a little-known corner of Mendocino County noted for white wines to one of the world’s front-rank producers of Pinot Noir. More specifically, it became clear at the festival that the ambitious young vintners who have flocked to the valley’s Pinot grapes in recent years are inspiring resident wineries to raise their game.

One of the clearest signs was the Goldeneye tasting table. In past years, you would find the winery’s flagship bottling and its side-kick, Migration - two of the best-known, most sought-after Pinot Noirs from Anderson Valley. This year, those stalwarts were joined by two impressive new single-vineyard Pinot Noirs: Gowan Creek and Confluence.

Winemaker Zach Rasmussen, who normally describes just one or two wines to the festival visitors thronging his table, was hustling to open, pour and explain four.

“Now that we’ve got all 150 acres of our estate established,” he explained in a brief aside while pulling a cork, “we can start to pluck out these gems that nature gives us. Before we needed to bring everything into our two main wines to make sure they delivered the quality we’re known for. Now we have more latitude to add a few smaller programs when the conditions are right.”

That’s certainly part of the explanation, maybe even most of it. The rest of the story was playing out in any direction you looked under the giant, courtyard-shaped tasting tent.

One of the most important factors in Anderson Valley’s changing fortunes has been the huge growth in small-production, single-vineyard wines from new labels. These include Baxter, Black Kite, Breggo, Brogan, Copain, McPhail, Roessler, Woodenhead and others. All these wineries were pouring at the festival - usually represented by their winermakers or owners.

Not only that, but all the newcomers to the festival in 2008 also offered single-vineyard wines. These included Couloir, Ferrari Carano, Foursight Wines and Jim Ball Vineyards. Seeing mighty Goldeneye join this party was like an exclamation point: terroir is not just alive and well in Anderson Valley, it’s transforming the appellation.

This doesn’t mean the valley’s more established producers are sticking with Anderson Valley blends – or resting on their laurels. Claudia Springs, Handley, Husch, Lazy Creek, Londer, Navarro, Roederer Estate and Scharffenberger each produce at least one wine made all or mostly from wholly-owned vineyard estates, so you could argue that they started the site-specific trend in decades past.

Their current bottlings clearly show that they’ve also kept up with the times, particularly by balancing traditional Anderson Valley structure and length with richer mouth-feel and greater palate weight. These wines offer more pure drinking pleasure every passing year.

Frost, Frost, and Then More Frost

The 2008 vintage will provide an interesting test of all these phenomena. For one thing, many small vineyards that artisanal producers count on for vineyard designates were decimated by the frosts [see our story on the frost debacle].

Wells Guthrie of Copain estimates that the aggregate loss among the eight Anderson Valley vineyards he designates could be as high as 50 percent “In some vineyards a whole block got wiped out,” he reports. “I’m used to making small-production wines, but this vintage is going to give that phrase a whole new meaning.” Ron Verdier, who grows for McPhail, fears he lost everything from his vineyard near Boonville. “I’m not counting on a crop this year,” he said.

Valley growers know they are in a marginal climate for viticulture, but a decade or more of relatively benign weather had made the dangers seem manageable. Then came this winter’s combination of unrelenting cold and drought.

Most large vineyards long ago installed overhead sprinklers, which ward off the chill with an increase in humidity or by coating the vines’ tender young buds in wet ice that can hold steady at a safe 32º. “I was out there running the frost protection 45 nights this winter and spring,” reports Nathan Miller, who manages the vineyards for Goldeneye. “Even if we had a warm day, the cold came right back overnight.”

Paul Ardzrooni, who farms or consults on nearly a quarter of the appellation’s roughly 2200 vineyard acres, says he used more than 50 acre-feet of water in just one vital neighborhood on the east side of Highway 128, home to name-brand vineyards including Ferrington and Donnelly Creek.

The story was painfully different in smaller vineyards. Many have no overhead sprinklers, either due to cost or because they’re simply not supposed to be at risk for frost damage.

“Normally, in Mendocino, the cold air sheds off the ridges and hillsides and pools between the ridges, so frost damage is not that likely,” explains Glenn McGourty, the UC Davis extension viticultural advisor for Mendocino and Lake counties. “But this year we had a series of advective frosts, which means a mass of cold sweeps in that’s too big for the valleys to hold. It stratifies at high elevations. People up on the hillsides don’t even have frost protection in most cases, so they were helpless.”

How Dry Was My Valley

During the Pinot Noir Festival in mid-May, the last frost was just two weeks in the past, but growers were already focused on a new threat: drought.

Not only did the rains stop in February, but the frosts forced growers to use much of their water reserves for frost protection. “We used most of the water in our reservoir for frost protection early in the spring,” says Milla Handley of Handley Cellars. “By late April we ran out, and we had to start making decisions that break your heart.” Such as on the nights of April 21-22, when temperatures in Mendocino County plunged into the twenties.

Ultimately Handley had to leave her Gewurztraminer vines to the merciless cold and save other varieties as best she could by pulling water from wells and dragging mobile heaters through the vineyard on a trailer. She remembers the drought of the 1970s, when vineyard ponds went dry by summer’s end year after year. “But this is worse,” she said. “We’re starting the growing season with nothing.”

When I asked Norman Kobler, resident vineyard manager at Ferrington Vineyard, how much water he had left after frost protecting this winter and spring, his answer was typically direct and to the point: “Not enough to irrigate.”

Other vintners echoed this refrain, though most reckoned that their reservoirs had enough water to eke out an irrigation plan of some kind. Long-time resident Cynthia McMath summed it up with a story about flying over the valley with a local pilot in early May. “Looking down at the vineyards, it seemed like April,” she reported. “There was hardly any green growth. But looking at the vineyard ponds, it seemed like August or September. There wasn’t much water.”

Bob Klindt of Claudia Springs indicated that many growers are already planning to ration water through the growing season. “It’s like we’re having a late-summer drought emergency, even though it’s only May and the hillsides are still green,” he said. “Pretty crazy.”

What, I asked him, will it be like when late summer ultimately comes? “If we have a hot dry summer, it’s going to be rough on the vines,” he said. Then he waved around the tent at Anderson Valley’s assembled vintners. “And on all of us.”

---

Photos by Thom Elkjer