‘We have to lead the charge’: North Bay winemakers take on climate change

Thriving on the upper slopes of a 10-acre vineyard a few miles northwest of Sebastopol are row upon row of hardy Mencia grapevines, from the Spanish region of Galicia.

What are they doing there?

The short answer: While visiting the Iberian Peninsula some years ago, Andy Smith sampled some wine made from those grapes, and he liked it.

Smith, who is winemaker and partner at DuMOL Winery, also noted that Mencia did well “in a maritime climate, with coastal influence, in sandy soils” — similar to conditions in many of his company’s Sonoma County vineyards.

“So I thought, let’s do a little experimentation,” he recalls.

DuMOL specializes in pinot noirs and chardonnays from vineyards in the fog-shrouded Green Valley — roughly the triangle formed by Sebastopol, Forestville and Occidental. Consistently cool, relative to the rest of the region, winemakers there haven’t been as affected as others by drought and extreme heat.

Even so, Smith’s Iberian grape experiment can be seen as part of a broader movement now afoot in the wine industry — a ferment of ideas, if you will — to adapt to, and get ahead of, climate change.

Those ideas include creative ways to capture rainwater, then use that water more efficiently. Some fall under the awning of “regenerative farming” — practices that enrich soil, allowing it to retain more water and store more carbon dioxide.

Tactics range from the obvious — choosing grapes better suited to higher temperatures — to the esoteric, as when Roederer Estate winemaker and vice president of production Arnaud Weyrich gets rolling on how best to mitigate pesky “ice nucleating bacteria” that increase frost risk during bud break.

‘We will find ways around this’

Growers intent on getting to the root of the problem can choose drought resistant rootstock. In recent, parched years in Sonoma County, the 110 Richter rootstock has been a popular option, says Daisy Robledo of Grape Land Vineyard Management. That rootstock, known for its “strong vigor,” is a go-to for growers who opt for dry-farming: the practice of planting un-irrigated vines whose roots then range deep into the ground in search of water.

Robledo’s husband, Marcelo, a kind of plant surgeon, is a third-generation bud grafter, expert at transforming a rootstock that previously produced chardonnay, for instance, into one that will yield pinot noir.

In the teeth of severe drought two years ago, he told the Press Democrat that climate change had prompted at least half his clients to switch to new grape varieties.

These and other “tools in the toolbox,” says Smith, are helping North Coast winemakers adapt to the increasingly frequent “extreme climatic events” visited upon the region in recent years.

For one thing, he pointed out, they’ve had plenty of practice over the last 15 years, dealing with drought, floods and wildfires. That experience, coupled with the resources, research and technical ability to be found in Sonoma and Napa counties — “We’re sort of world-leading,” Smith said — gave him confidence “we will find ways around this.”

Leading the charge

“We’ve had cold springs before, but I don’t remember one as cold as this,” said Phil Coturri, the pioneering viticulturalist and organic farmer who is CEO of Enterprise Vineyard Management and co-owner of Winery Sixteen 600.

He’d just descended from Cavedale Road, which rises some 1,800 feet over Glen Ellen. At that elevation, he noted, the forest floor was “littered with broken branches” from snows earlier this year.

The climate has been changing “for millions of years,” he said. “But this accelerated climate change is a reality.

“We have to adapt. And as farmers, we have to lead the charge.”

Coturri no longer installs vineyards without a dual irrigated system — “sometimes even three.” The more advanced systems allow for adjustments, giving farmers the ability to direct water to “weaker areas, so you don’t have to water the whole vineyard.”

The third line is for “misters” which help cool crops during heat spikes. Where those aren’t available, Coturri has used “sun screen” — a natural clay solution sprayed on the leaves, providing protection for the grapes underneath.

Like others, he and his crews are “raising the fruit zone” — growing the grapes farther from the ground, which refracts the sun’s heat upward, and can burn lower-hanging fruit.

While Coturri still sees “old time vineyards” planted with both cabernet and chardonnay, “I wouldn’t do that now.”

“There’s nothing like having an old vine, but you’ve got to keep it alive, and you keep it alive by having the soil that’s alive, using cover crops, and really thinking about how you can conserve water.”

Broken system

That’s music to the ears of Ames Morison, co-founder of the Medlock Ames winery estate, 340 acres in the hills east of Healdsburg.

Morison was inspired to become an organic farmer during his years in Guatemala with the Peace Corps, from 1993 to ’96. But his focus was sharpened, his sense of urgency heightened, by the 2019 Kincade Fire.

That blaze did significant damage to the winery, which lost 1,000 trees and a fifth of its 50 planted vineyard acres. It also served as a sort of shock therapy — an enforced reset for Morison, who “started doing a lot of research and reading and listening about different approaches to farming.”

He became an expert on regenerative farming. Once that happened, says Morison, “the dime dropped, it all made sense to me.”

Regenerative, he explains, “means to make something better, to improve it.” It transcends “sustainability,” which he regards as a buzzword. “We have an agricultural system that is broken,” he said. “It’s not something we want to sustain.”

Nobody puts Babydoll in the corner

From memory, he ticks off the five (mostly soil-centric) principles of regenerative farming:

“Minimal disturbance”: Plowing and tilling kills microbes that live in the top layer of the soil, which then “doesn’t hold its structure as well,” and turns into mud when it rains, “and a lot of it runs off.”

“Maintaining a living root in the ground”: Ensures that plants are capturing carbon from the atmosphere, while feeding the soil. Fallow fields and monocropping, prevent that.

“Armoring the soil” and “Enhancing Biodiversity”: “We do heavy cover-cropping,” says Brandon Bredo, farm & forest manager at Hanzell Vineyards in Sonoma, another outfit on the cutting edge of regenerative farming, although Bredo prefers “holistic farming.”

Before the first rain of the season, he and his team seed vineyards with legumes, peas, fava beans, vetch — “things that are going to fix nitrogen in the soil.” Those cover crops help turn the soil into “this moisture blanket, a shield from the sun that keeps the soil temperatures low.”

Regular infusions of compost and “biochar” (burnt wood, basically) makes the soil “fluffier, and capable of holding more water,” adds Weyrich, the Roederer Estate winemaker.

Bredo concurs. When it comes to topsoil, fluffy is good. Transitioning to holistic farming, he says, “has allowed us to reduce our irrigation by 60%.”

Finally, regenerative farming calls for “integrating animals,” which explains the menagerie of some 150 critters roaming the grounds at Hanzell, including 11 babydoll Southdown sheep, 10 American Guinea hogs — and they are some fine swine — four belted Galloway cows, two livestock guardian dogs plus assorted geese, ducks and chickens.

With bud break in progress, the sheep were banished to the forest and pasture, said Bredo, “because they would love to eat the fresh vines.”

At the other end of the spectrum from the boutique Ames Medlock (6,500 cases sold per year) is Sonoma County’s largest producer, Jackson Family Wines (6 million cases sold per year.)

Gathering danger

Both are members of International Wineries for Climate Action, a group of 40 wineries from 10 countries and five continents around the world whose goal is “to collectively decarbonize the global wine industry.”

Jackson Family Wines cofounded the four-year-old nonprofit, whose website warns that “Increasingly frequent extreme events, from droughts to flooding to wildfires, place entire harvests — and businesses — in danger.”

To join, members must commit to becoming carbon neutral by 2050 — and to achieving certain intermediate targets by 2030.

The Santa Rosa-based giant announced in August, 2021 that it would cut its carbon footprint in half by 2030. It vowed also to “move every estate vineyard to regenerative farming,” and “continue to deploy smart water management practices.”

Since 2008, the company has reduced the amount of water used in its wineries by 43%. the result of a lot of “small tweaks that made a big difference,” said vice president of sustainability Katie Jackson.

One such adjustment took place at the company’s La Crema winery in Windsor, where it occurred to some employees that the huge tanks sitting empty for six months of the year — including during the rainy season — might be put to better use.

Since then, those tanks, and tanks at other Jackson wineries, have been used to store captured rainwater.

Closer to home, said Jackson, the company is partnering with the Dry Creek Rancheria of Pomo Indians, Sonoma Water and other agencies to pursue an innovative effort to recharge the Alexander Valley groundwater aquifer. That would be accomplished, she explained, by “shaving peak flows” from the Russian River after heavy rains, then diverting it onto land, intentionally flooding selected vineyards. That water would “percolate down into the groundwater table, to be accessible during drier times of the year.”

This is something California wants to do “at scale, across the state,” she said. “I believe it could be a way to hedge against years of drought and water scarcity.”

Imperiled buds

Up in the Anderson Valley, at the Roederer Estate winery in Philo, Weyrich had a more immediate goal: making sure frost didn’t kill his crop.

During “two long frost nights” earlier in the week, the winery expended thousands of gallons of water to keep frost at bay. Overhead sprinklers coat the vines with a layer of ice, which protects the buds and new shoots.

Because the ground is already saturated, much of the sprinkler runoff flowed through the winery’s underground French drains back into storage ponds.

“So we’re going to be back to full again pretty quickly,” he said. “That’s a pleasant feeling.”

Noting that showers and unsettled weather was forecast for the weekend, he said, “It is what it is. We’ll take it.

“We just need some sunshine around summertime, so the grapes can get ripe.”

You can reach Staff Writer Austin Murphy at austin.murphy@pressdemocrat.com or on Twitter @ausmurph88.