Episode 22: North Coast Wine and Water
“If you do everything right in the vineyard and you bring me good fruit we are gonna make really good wine, and I don't really have to do very much in the winery.”
glenn mcgourty
A conversation with Glenn McGourty (University of California Cooperative Extension Viticulture & Plant Science Advisor Emeritus) about grape water use, wine production, and dryland viticulture in Mendocino and Lake Counties. Released May 28, 2021.
guests on the show
Glenn McGourty
Glenn McGourty is an Emeritus University of California Cooperative Extension Viticulture and Plant Sciences Advisor for Mendocino and Lake Counties. Additionally, Glenn owns and operates the Spirit Canyon Vineyard in Mendocino County specializing in Arneis grape production. Glenn is an expert in sustainable wine grape production, soil-grape-water relations, and evaluating Mediterranean grape varieties for California’s changing climate. He recently moved from a community-based research and extension role to government as the 1st District Supervisor for Mendocino County. Learn more about North Coast viticulture and enology resources here and follow Glenn McGourty on Facebook here.
Transcript
Mallika Nocco
Hello Water Talk listeners. In today's episode, we are talking about wine grapes and viticulture, and just a little bit about politics, with Glenn McGourty. Glenn McGourty was a viticulture and plant science farm advisor. Now he's an emeritus advisor for Lake and Mendocino County. He's also- this is pretty cool- the newly elected first district supervisor in Mendocino County. And it was pretty neat to just hear about a person who had a career in extension and then actually took that to a career in politics.
I also just wanted to really talk to Glenn because also I have an interest in dryland viticulture, which is especially important in a dry year, I think many people are thinking about dryland agriculture in general. And of course, I love wine. And I was very curious about how California water is becoming California wine. So, I'm curious to hear more from you Faith and Sam about what your thoughts were and what you'd like folks to pay attention to in this episode with Glenn.
Faith Kearns
For me, it was just super interesting to talk with Glenn as somebody who's been in extension for such a long time. I think, you know, the three of us work in extension, and it's always great to talk with people who have that same kind of experience and same orientation toward the world. And I also think, you know, we don't talk a lot about Mendocino and Lake counties, and especially about growing wine in those areas. So, it's just a super interesting conversation with somebody who has a lot of interesting experiences over his career.
Sam Sandoval
And in my case, I think if you have a friend or someone that would like to do some wine grape growing production, send this podcast, it really tells you from A to Z what's going on in wine grape production. The second one is to switch gears by the end towards his now political career. And he brings a very good point on how scientists and people living in the community, st some point, you're getting to the point that you want to bring that into the policy arena. I think if any one of our audience id having this duality in your career, I think it's fine. Listen to Glenn, it's a good example of how that evolved.
Mallika Nocco
Yeah, I think that that's a really great point, Sam, especially is just thinking about extension folks as these embedded community scientists and one thing that I kind of listened for and thought about a lot in think about in this conversation is that it ended up being water, right? So, when you think about grapes in terms of their water use great, they're actually kind of low water users. That's why they can be in many cases translated into dryland viticultural systems.
But in the end, if that water question and water problems and water concerns are what led to heading in this policy-oriented direction for Glenn, which I thought was pretty interesting that, you know, when you're working with a low water using crop, you still can't escape. Can't escape the water questions coming up. So, I thought that was pretty great.
Glenn, you've been an agricultural advisor for Lake and Mendocino counties for over 30 years. Can you just tell us a little bit about agriculture in this area, like what kind of crops are grown, what it looks like for those who haven't visited?
Glenn McGourty
Sure. So, we're part of the North Coast agricultural area, Napa, Sonoma, Mendocino, and Lake counties. We consider ourselves to be the crown jewels of California viticulture because we get paid the most for our wine and our grapes. So that's from an economic point of view. I'm sure there's lots of other places that want to argue who makes better wine, but we certainly were up there and our county's a little different than Napa and Sonoma, and more like Lake in that we’re very mountainous and not very many people. We are two thirds the size of the state of Connecticut. Connecticut has 4 million people. We have 88,000. We have about the same population density as Elko, Nevada. So, it's a lovely place.
There's a lot of forest and the climate changes pretty dramatically as you go from the Pacific Ocean where it's so cool you can't really grow wine grapes. And then as you go through these mountain valleys and hillsides, we have many microclimates and we go through a lot of different viticultural areas. So, in a small space of about 20 miles, you're able to go everything from world class Pinot and Chardonnay, and we make very good sparkling wine and Anderson Valley, and then you come over the hill into Ukiah Valley. And in the Ukiah Valley area, it's much warmer, it's almost as warm as Davis. But our nights are cooler. And we're able to grow Cabernet Sauvignon, and Syrah, Zinfandel, and Chardonnay, and varieties that we associate with the warmer kind of grape growing regions.
And that's historically really where the wine grape industry really got started was here on the interior part of Mendocino County. We didn't start actually growing grapes into the cooler parts like Anderson Valley until the 1970s. The wine grape industry here is well over 150 years old. And it was the that Italians played a very important part because they knew that in order to be an Italian, you needed wine, and they drank a lot. So per capita consumption of wine in Italy used to be about 60 gallons per person, that's a lot of wine. And that's per capita consumption because to live, you drank wine, because if you think about it, going back to the ancient days, water was potentially poisonous.
So, you think about Julius Caesar, when he traveled, he had a ration for his troops of about two liters a day. Because in order to stay alive, if you didn't drink water, you poured wine into it, because it contains ethanol, which is a pretty good antibiotic. So, you drank wine to stay healthy. Plus, it also kind of mentally put you in the right mood to cross the English Channel and take on fighting people and things like that. So not only where they were they capable troops, they were happy troops because they had wine to come along on the trail.
Mallika Nocco
I like their style. I should start, I've got my water right here, I should start doing that. So, you actually mentioned some of the different kinds of grapes that are in the region. That's really interesting that it was inland and then it went out. So, I was curious, what is your favorite affordable wine from the area right now that might be relatively easy to find, for our listeners.
Glenn McGourty
Sure, one of the wines that's pretty easy to find is the Fetzer Bonterra wines. And they they're organic wines, which I've worked a lot with organic and biodynamic growers, they're not too expensive. And they're well distributed. So, their Chardonnay to me is one of the nicest Chardonnay’s in California. I'm not a big Chardonnay fan, but that's one that I will drink regularly. And they also make really good Zinfandel, these are two of my favorites.
Mallika Nocco
So, we often hear or I least I've often heard that wine grapes are not a water demanding crop. And I just was curious, is that true? And if so could you give us some sense of how much water wine grapes actually need, or use?
Glenn McGourty
Sure. So, I've done a couple of studies with my colleagues on agricultural water use in the upper Russian River watershed and also agricultural water use in the Navarro River watershed where we actually went out and worked with growers to take a look at what was the actual amount of water that they applied in a growing season. And it is true wine grapes generally at least in coastal areas don't use a huge amount of water. So, for the Ukiah Valley, the typical vineyard would take about six to 12 inches of consumptive water use and Anderson Valley might be as low as one or two acre-inches. We're really just assisting the vines a little bit at the end so that they don't stall out and start to desiccate.
So, there's a couple of reasons for this one is the climate. It rains a lot here. So, we are supposed to get a lot of rain I guess I should say. So, we often get 36 inches of rain in a winter. And then we have some pretty nice soils that hold water well. So, you know, I think the actual water demand by wine grapes is probably somewhere around 18 to 24 inches in a season and we can store at least 12 of those inches in the soil profile in many cases. So, then we just have to make up the difference with a little bit of drip irrigation.
The game changer is frost protection, so in the lower areas, then we're going to need another three to six inches of water for frost protection using sprinklers. Because that takes a fair amount of water, you've got to be able to deliver water at a rate of about 55 gallons per minute per acre. So, you're gonna need pretty big pumps and reservoirs and a good source of water for doing that. But not all acres are frost protected. And sometimes if you're just in the right part and landscape and we get off the bottom of the landscape, then you don't really need that overhead frost protection. And in fact, the first vineyards in Mendocino County, the strategy that the pioneers used was that they chose sites that were upland, where cold air wouldn't settle.
They didn't try to grow along the river, because they knew that it froze too often in the springtime. So, they would go upland where cold air drained off. And then they planted varieties that budded out late. And then they would also double prune. So, they would prune, they use a pruning strategy that delayed budbreak. So, they thought it out pretty carefully. And this was viticulture that they brought with them from Italy and southern France. And that was where they were pioneer roots came from that started our industry.
Mallika Nocco
That's really interesting, I'm super curious about the frost protection. So just kind of from like that sustainability perspective, this frost, the sprinklers are going to be coming in the early spring, winter, is when that would be happening where you'd be applying the water for frost protection. So, wouldn't the recharge just kind of go into the soil moisture bank?
Glenn McGourty
Exactly. Right. So, you know, it's not like you're wasting the water, it's stored in the soil. So, there's a couple good things about it is yes, you don't lose it. The bad is that you, you encourage a lot of vigorous growth because you're watering at a time where we'd rather not do that, as we've learned about deficit irrigation. And our tendency is that if we can we hold back on our water a little bit in the beginning of the year. In the olden days, the guys used to start irrigation normally in early June. And nowadays we try to wait until July so that we keep the canopies kind of a little bit smaller.
Then we start to irrigate once the vegetative growth is slowed down. Grapevines are really interesting plants because we throw away most of the canopy of the plant. Compared to tree crops where you have to wait for the canopy to grow for five or six years. But every year with the grapevine you're throwing away the canopy, you cut it off, and really minimize the size of the plant and all this stuff happens like in six to eight weeks, the canopy grows back, and it blooms and sets a crop. It's really remarkable. It's the vegetative cycle of grapevines, it is very intensive very quick.
So, we spend a lot of time trying to manage the canopy because it has a lot to do with wine grape quality, we don't want too much vegetation. We don't want to create a really dense foliage where air doesn't move easily because otherwise, we have insect and disease problems. So, we really changed in the certainly the 30 years that I've worked with wine grapes, their approach to managing canopies has become real critical to wine quality.
Mallika Nocco
Hmm, that's super interesting. I don't know how many crops there are like that, I guess. And I don't know if Sam or Faith has anything to add on this but where you are trying to manage it for scarce canopy be like that? That's pretty, maybe rare to wine grapes.
Glenn McGourty
I think in general, the horticultural world's looking at that a little bit more because we have a pear industry here and they do some of the similar sorts of things, not quite as extreme as wine grapes, but they're finding that if they don't push too much nitrogen and water they don't grow so much vegetation and then they don't have grow so hard in the winter. So, they try to create these balance plants that that are smaller.
You know, the tree fruit industry and Pacific Northwest in particular, they are trying to do away with ladders, so they use dwarfing rootstocks and they really try hard to keep the plants bearing young and not overly vigorous so that they don't need to do as much pruning and other activities and they're trying to get rid of ladder and go shorter where they can.
Mallika Nocco
Hmm, that's super cool. So, I guess I'm the same as since we're talking about the seasons of the wine grapes themselves, and that the vegetative growth, I think anyone who's been on a vineyard tour -and I will say I have been on a few, because I always say yes to the tour- has heard about veraison. And this idea that irrigation is pulled back during that time period. Can you tell us a little bit about that - there's some irrigation but it's being k balanced to maintain not so dense of a canopy, but then it's pulled back even further, would you say around the time or just the ramp up and then go back down?
Glenn McGourty
It depends who the grower is and how you're doing that. So, me personally, I'm a white grape grower. So, what I do is I hold back in the beginning and then once we start to irrigate, we keep it going so depends on the block. So, there's one block of the Italian variety Arneis that I grow, it's very vigorous. And I typically don't start irrigating Arneis until the end of July or beginning of August. And we usually harvest the first or second week of September. So, we have a very short window that we're irrigating in.
On some of my other varieties, like Marsanne and Roussanne, I start a little bit sooner. And I look for basically a threshold and the vine has a look as you're getting to the point where you need to irrigate, you can kind of tell looking at it, the leaves change color, the shoot tips stop growing. And if you actually use a thing called a pressure chamber where you can go out and measure how tightly the water's being held by the plant, you can figure out exactly when you need to start irrigating.
So, for white varieties, we figure when we have about minus 12 bars or minus 12 atmospheres. So, in other words, the water is being held pretty tightly by the plant, then we know okay, it's time to turn on the water. And that usually corresponds with white varieties around the first week of July. And red varieties might be a couple weeks later. Once we start to irrigate, though, I like to keep water on the plants and never stress because what we want to do is we want to get photosynthesis going and keep it going. And we don't want to stress the plant. Because if you if you stress the plant towards the end, you'll get ripening by dehydration, which is unbalanced. So, you end up with a lot of acid in the wine with high sugar, and it makes the wine kind of tart and unpleasant. So, we want to resolve some of that acidity.
I mean, I think everyone's had an example of biting the green apple, it's not very pleasant. So, a green apple with high sugar doesn't taste very good compared to one that has you know less acid and nice sugar and I would try and do the same thing with our wine grapes, just get the acid down, get the pH up. And then when we have about around 22 to 23% sugar, and we have our pH of around 3.5-3.6 and titratable acidity of around, I don't know, six or seven grams per liter that's kind of the sweet spot where we pick and make really nice wine.
So, if you do everything, right, the winemaker says the kind of fruit they really want, you just crush and get it from that. And some people don't even add yeast, they just let it ferment. And it takes off on its own and makes wonderful wine and they figure, if you do everything right in the vineyard and you bring me good fruit, we're gonna make really good wine. And I don't really have to do very much in the winery. So that's the kind of wine makers that I work with that really want me to take the time and sweat the details, and when they get it, it's really easy for them to do their job.
Mallika Nocco
That makes a lot of sense, because it's almost kind of like the same type of like farm to table ethic, right? Where we grow really good food or grow really great produce and it's going to turn into really good food, and you don't have to do a lot to it.
Glenn McGourty
That's the whole secret of Italian cooking you know, I mean it's not very fancy cooking from a preparation point of view, but it's very much about high quality ingredients, as opposed to French cooking, where they do a lot of manipulation in the kitchen and do a lot of sauces and stuff. Actually French winemaking is very similar too because if you go to France, you'll discover that their climate is not always that great for winemaking. That's why they have vintage years because there's only certain years where things really get good and ripe when, by definition, California has a vintage year almost every year from a French perspective because it's pretty rare that we don't get full sugar full ripeness.
In fact, we have to put the brakes on some years because we go right on past the perfect period and then we end up with too much sugar and not enough acid. And then you’ve got to start fiddling around with stuff in the winery and manipulate it so the French are the world's best wine makers with not so good fruit. They can always make something drinkable because some harvests are just dreadful. They have lots of mold and they have to fix things and add sugar and manipulate it and some years they have perfect conditions, and the wines are excellent, So it just depends but there's a lot of variation from season to season ,which in California we're so lucky because the weather's nice here and in most years sunny and dry and it's pretty rare we have a harvest that gets wrecked from rain.
Mallika Nocco
Okay, so yeah, that was actually my question. When you say having a vintage or not having a vintage is that just like having grapes that are usable for making wine. Is that what that means?
Glenn McGourty
Yeah. So, what they do is they celebrate their years that are really good. And it used to be that they wouldn't get enough heat to quite ripen everything. So, they would really make a note when the sugar got up to 23 and a half in France, so it'd be really special vintage. A lot of times the way that the harvest goes in Europe, it's the 21st of September, I don't care what condition that fruit is, and start picking because it's going to be raining really quickly, and everything is going to turn to rot and mold. And I've seen it.
I've been there in Italy when they said we're picking tomorrow. And I said, well, what's the sugars and they go, I don't know, but we can smell vinegar. So, it's time to go. Wow, they fix it up. They're really good at that, they're you know, modern sciences really helped the wine industry tremendously, that they can make drinkable stuff out of just about anything, but the really good wine comes when all of the right chemistry comes in.
Mallika Nocco
That's really interesting. So, one of the questions I had was, I think, because I'm a plant person, I was really thinking about the water use in wine as the water use grapes. But I was curious if there are other parts of the process where there was a significant amount of water needed.
Glenn McGourty
Well in processing wine, a significant amount of water is used as well. So, depending on the efficiency of the of the winery, you know, some old wineries are very inefficient, they might use three gallons of water for every one gallon of wine they produce. And like the winery at UC Davis that Roger Bolton designed is amazing because they can recycle water about five times and then still send it out to the vineyard and irrigate with it. So, their efficiencies are way way up because of that.
So, they figured out ways of cleaning and recycling water and not using caustic sodium hydroxide and things like the way that old fashioned wineries did for cleaning and consequently, they're much less water intensive. So, the trend all over is that people are trying to cut down on water use and when I talk with growers about designing their vineyard I always say you know you designed for your vines to be drought tolerant and design your vineyard so that you won't need water because of the way our climate seems to be getting drier and hotter. We want to have vines that are tough enough to take that and not miss a beat.
Mallika Nocco
Yeah, so what do you actually tell them to do or like what types of advice would you have to make for a drought hardy vineyard?
Glenn McGourty
So, rootstock choice is really important, we were using more vigorous root stocks than we used to so these probably won't mean a lot to you but they're hybrids that come from Vitis rupestris and are particularly useful, Vitis rupestris comes from Texas and it's a very drought tolerant wine tolerant rootstock. So, we use that and Vitis berlandieri. So, these are more dry drought tolerant crosses. So that's one of the things I recommend.
I also recommend that they think about cane pruning as opposed to cordon pruning, because in cordon pruning, you're making kind of like a permanent wooden structure that the Spurs come off of. In cane pruning, we kind of minimize the size of the vine, and then we leave long canes and that allows us to adjust. Adjust bud number, if we get into a dry year, we can have fewer buds very easily on the vine, and then a year where it's a little bit more moist, and we want to balance that we can put more buds on, so you know these kind of training for that is one way to do it.
And of course, drip irrigation. I would never install a vineyard without drip irrigation. The olden days say they use sprinklers, but we don't do that anymore. So those are some of the things that I recommend. I also recommend healthy soil using cover crops and compost and building organic matter because again, that gives you increased water holding capacity. For every 1% of organic matter we put in the soil we hold about another 20,000 gallons of available water for the vines. So, if we can get three or four extra percent of organic matter which is possible in Mendocino County, we can hold another 60,000 gallons of water which is really helpful.
And also, we find that soils with high organic matter and cover crops take water better they resist erosion. So, these are some of the practices that I think are really useful for keeping your vines healthy and able to deal with that sudden deluge of water that might come in the fall without eroding, and then also infiltration goes way up. So, the water that does hit goes down into the soil. So, these are all reasons why we're kind of looking at cover cropping,
Mallika Nocco
It always is going to be a healthier soil is going to make it better, including grapes. So that's, that's good to hear.
Glenn McGourty
Yeah, because of our sunlight and tillage, organic matter tends to evaporate. So, we have to work a little extra at getting organic matter into the soil. So, it's a challenge in California to build organic matter. And depending on the cropping system, you know, so if you're growing vegetables, it's a little more difficult for you to be able to grow cover crops and work them into your farming cycle.
But for grapevines, it's really easy. I have my block of Arneis that I planted in 1994. I haven't disced since 1996. And, you know, we also have started using sheep to mow in the springtime, which has reduced our need for herbicides, and they recycle the cover crops, and it looks like a golf course when they're finished, we bring them in very large numbers, you might have 400 sheep per acre. They're there for a day, day and a half and they're gone. And it's really fun. It just kind of adds to the circus like atmosphere of our vineyard, but it certainly has certainly from a sustainability point of view been a really good way to go.
Mallika Nocco
I think if you can use sheep, why not use sheep, Right? I guess one of my questions about it is do they do wait for them to like, have manure in that area, too? Or do they just eat the eat down the grasses and then leave?
Glenn McGourty
Yeah, it's all part of the cycle. I mean, while they're eating they deposit a certain amount of urine and manure every day, and so they convert it into a form that then is biologically potent and charged and gets broken down further by bacteria and fungi. And so, it's a positive impact on the soil.
So, we have a lot of biodynamic farmers and they talked about that. They want to see animal agriculture integrated in with plant agriculture not separated because they feel that the two of them together are complementary.
Mallika Nocco
Yeah, I was curious about this biodynamic thing? Is there a difference between an organic wine and a biodynamic wine? What are some of these differences? And then can you have a line that is both organic and biodynamic?
Glenn McGourty
That's a really good question. So really there's the biodynamic wines and vineyards following the Demeter farming standard, whichrequires that certain practices are done but sort of entry level for biodynamics is that you have to at least be using the equivalent of organic practices and then you have to apply their bio regulator preparations that they use that are the mysterious things that include manure buried in a cow horn, and with the falling Equinox and ground crystal buried in the spring equinox. And then you grind them, and you make homeopathic solutions. So, they're very teeny amounts, you know, you're putting on an ounce per acre on the foliage of ground quartz crystal in the springtime and, and then in fall and winter, you're putting on the equivalent amount of, of preparation 500, which is a manure that's been in a cow horn, and then stirred it has to be dynamized.
So, you start one direction for five minutes to create a vortex and then you change the vortex direction for another five minutes. And there's absolutely no scientific explanation for how these things work. So as a scientist, you know, you're going, huh, that's interesting. But you know, I was raised in Irish Catholic. So, faith and mystery is a really important part of my value system. So we know there's some things you just can't understand. And that's kind of how the biodynamic farmers think about it. And, you know, the good news is that at the end of the day, when you follow the practices, and you farm this way, you can make really good wine and in fact, some of the great wines of the world are farmed biodynamically.
So, the Mandalaise Romanee Conti, which is one of Burgundy's best Pinot Noirs that they make and it costs like $1500 a bottle and there's a waiting list. You can't even get it if you want it. You know, that's farmed biodynamically. So, there's many, many other really good wines that are done biodynamically. So, it's a system that works.
And while we have a right to be as a scientist, a little bit skeptical of some of the things, we've also learned over the years that farmers develop a system for farming their fruit, and they have anticipated results, and they get there from a lot of different pathways. There isn't one prescription that's going to bring you there. So, biodynamic farming os a pathway that can get you to very good wine. And in most cases, I know most people who farmed biodynamically are just genuinely good farmers to begin with. And that's probably 90% of the battle.
Mallika Nocco
So, you went from this career in agricultural extension to politics. I'm curious what made you decide to take on the supervisor role specifically, and you already kind of spoke to this a little bit, but I was thinking about just how you're going to bring your unique extension expertise to this new role and what would you tell other people in science and extension who are thinking about entry into politics?
Glenn McGourty
It's really interesting, because what got me interested and being involved in politics is water. And we're facing a really critical issue in Mendocino County, right now. And, in fact, Sam is here in the background and he's involved too. There's a power generation system called the Potter Valley Project that takes water from the Eel River and goes through a mountain and in a tunnel and as it comes out, it generates electricity and then the water is dumped into Potter Valley where they irrigate with it, and then it passes on to Lake Mendocino, which is in the Russian River watershed. And then it finds its way down to Sonoma County and Marin County eventually. So, there's a lot of communities very dependent on this water.
PG&E on the project, they decided that they didn't find it profitable anymore, so they wanted to let it go. And so, it's kind of like a jump ball in basketball. So, it's coming down and someone's got to grab it and play with it. And there's competing interests, there's some people that would like to shut it off and let the water just flow in the Eel River basin to enhance fisheries. But it's absolutely critical for Mendocino County and all the communities along the upper Russian River. All the way basically Potter Valley to Healdsburg.
And then in addition to that, I've also been involved with sustainable groundwater management. I've been on the committee to manage the Ukiah Valley basin. I feel like these are really important areas that Mendocino County has got to be at the table with their thinking cap on because when it comes to natural resources, particularly water, of rural counties are often at a disadvantage. And they often get abused by more urban counties that have the resources come in and take away the water. Right. So, we see San Luis Obispo County being affected by Monterey, Mendocino County has been affected by Sonoma, Lake County's been affected by Yolo.
So, this is a real common pattern of where water resources have been improved upon in terms of water storage, but the water doesn't actually benefit the community that they're in. So, I'm very, very concerned that Mendocino doesn't get left literally high and dry as we go through the process of deciding what's going to be the fate of the water from the Eel River and the diversion. So that's kind of good.
And then along the way, the other thing is that I think the process that we use, and as scientists of gathering data to make decisions, is a really good one. And I have another old saying, in God, we trust, and everybody else bring data. And I think it's really critical when you're trying to make decisions that you have good information. And I often see things happen where people react a little bit too emotionally and not logically enough and doing things like planning, as we do as scientists where we plan experiments, we apply for grants, we put together research teams, you know, we have a research plan, and then we gather data, analyze it and write reports and reach conclusions and hopefully implement new ways of doing things is a really strong model for other parts of life.
Mallika Nocco
Absolutely, absolutely. And just kind of pairing that with like the extension component, right. So doing the science and then being you know, as you said, as good of a listener as you can be in trying to take that science and apply it and help several different people with several different needs make use of it.