One of the things I’ve noticed about small town life is that we townies love a good crisis. If everything is buzzing along with nary a problem, we’re at a loss. But give us a rocky ravine to cross over and we’ve found our bliss. Water cooler talk about the weather has always been a favorite riff in these parts. And with the vines living and dying by the weather, I can see why.
Talks turned fierce this winter when we found ourselves amid what felt like the summer solstice, for the entire month of December and good part of January. Over the holidays, my visiting East Coast contingent asked, “Is it always like this?” To which I quipped, “Of course.” I stretched the truth because it took these folks 10 years and the birth of my twins to take a chance and spend Christmas on what they refer to as the “Crazy Left Coast.” My tween nieces looked on from the pool at Solage, clad in nothing more than bikinis on December 27, also wondering what gives with the weather.
I’m embarrassed to admit, I also enjoyed the warm run. It gave me the encouragement I needed to venture out of the house with my hound and babies. But as the lack of rain continued and drought talk turned terse, reality hit—especially when I caught sight of a sign as I strolled past Calistoga’s Café Sarafornia in flip flops and a tee-shirt in late January: “Water by request, and only if you really need it, there’s a drought going on.” Of course, it was naive of me to think that all of the soaring sunshine would come without a cost, but as a born and bred East Coaster, lack of rainfall is never an issue. In early February, when I decided to cover the drought, there was still not a drop of rain to be found, until I started typing. Then, almost like magic, the rain began to fall. Eight inches over the course of a couple days, yet a burning question still remained on the tip of nearly every townie’s tongue: Was it too little, too late?
In the world according to Napa Valley wine, it may well be. In response to the drought, the Napa Valley Grapegrowers held a special press conference to discuss the fallout of what’s become the driest season on record, with 2013 rainfall amounting to a mere four to eight inches, as opposed to our norm, which falls between 12 to 24 inches annually. One of the bigger issues the vines face is the early onset of bud break, which, for many, came nearly a month too soon. Growers turned to vineyard management tactics in hopes of slowing things down. Groundwater measurements taken in January showed stable levels on the valley floor, but the hills weren’t so lucky. Pruning, which normally takes place between January and April, was already 50 percent complete, valley-wide, by the end of January.
Another significant effect of the drought was the lack of cover crops like mustard, which reliably paint our vineyards come wintertime. This season, such blooms were practically nonexistent, until late February (and then sparse), leaving the vines in distress and susceptible to pests.
When times get tough, talk turns techie, even in the wine biz. Growers looked to in-the-field technology to manage the vines and water resources on a micro level, and enacted measures like precision irrigation. Others leaned on technology as a means for monitoring weather stations and soil conditions. Frost posed even more of a concern this year, as growers feared there might not be adequate water resources to protect the vines. Reservoir levels are running low, as the threat of the summer swelter looms in the not-so-distant future. Soaring temps could be the tipping point of an already sinking ship. According to water officials, even if we were to get an additional foot of rain (unlikely), the California water supply will have only reached 1977 levels—a time that’s on record and infamous as the year that produced the second-lowest level of rainfall in the state.
Each town has reacted to the drought differently. St. Helena enacted a cautionary Phase I emergency plan in mid-January in hopes of raising public awareness and encouraging voluntary conservation. It soon followed with February’s enforcement of Phase II, which restricted residential water use to 65 gallons per person per day. Yountville, Napa and Calistoga initially opted for more of a wait-and-see approach, until the latter enacted a Stage 2 mandatory conservation plan to be enforced as of March 1. It’s tough to know if any of these measures will be enough to mitigate the damage that the lack of rainfall has already done.
But, despite it all, the freakish summerlike weather of winter offered an unexpected boon to some businesses. Wind machine (which offers an alternative means of frost protection) rentals quadrupled and sales doubled. In December and January, tourism and tasting room traffic was up, along with hotel occupancy, as opposed to the typical slowdown that comes during the winter months. So while the desert-like conditions may have crippled this season’s crops, there was an upside, if you can call it that.
As I finished tapping out the last of this column four days after I began, the rain stopped falling. It’s hard to know if the state of our weather will still be all-ears-in around the water cooler, come print time, with tongues sloshing back and forth about selling off reserves, carryover water, allocations and banked H2O, or if we’ll have resorted to complaining about soggy conditions and not seeing the sun for days. Here’s hoping for another weather fluke.
