Hawkes Wine Blog

And now, if you’ll permit me, I’d like to get a little nerdy and experimental with you.

One of the perks of this job is that, at the end of the day, we get to take home the leftovers. I’ve done more wine tasting in this fashion than I have by actually going out to wineries, because I have at least a dozen friends who work at tasting rooms, run wineries, or work in the industry in some capacity. At our house, there’s usually juice from White Oak Winery, Medlock Ames, Red Car Wine Company, Hawley, Blanchard Family, and Silver Oak. And there’s always Hawkes. This is how I have come to know our wines forward and back; I drink them every day, and I’ve developed a relationship with each one.

Most of the time, if it’s been out for a couple days, we’ll dump the dregs. We’re all usually bringing home anywhere from two to six bottles of wine, depending on the season and the day of the week, so there is always plenty to go around, and there’s no sense in drinking something oxidized beyond recognition.

Which is why when I was at Peter’s house last week, I was skeptical when he went to pop the cork on a bottle of 2007 Alexander Valley Cab that had languished, half-full with the cork all the way back in, for over a week on the sideboard.

“You’re going to drink that?” I asked. Usually that bottle of wine would move over next to the olive oil, where it would be used for braising, marinating, and de-glazing pans.

“I’m going to try it, yeah,” he said. He reasoned that because the bottle was a little over half-full and had not been opened multiple times in the week since I had brought it home, yes, there would be more air in the bottle than was ideal, but that amount of air had remained constant. He tried it, than passed it to me, saying, “See what you think.”

He and I have an understanding: he’s not allowed to express any sort of opinion about wine until after I’ve tried it. I’m like a sponge, and I’ll glom onto whatever he says because of some Freudian desire to fit in, or something ridiculous like that. So what I thought about this week-old 2007 Cab was this:

It wasn’t bad. In fact, aside from very mild oxidization, it was pretty darn good. My personal preference in wine draws me to more tannic, structured Cabs (I can’t decide if that led me to work at Hawkes, or if it came about because I work at Hawkes), and the week of being open in our chilly kitchen had rendered it softer than I preferred. But it still had nice acidity, and it went nicely with our polenta with spinach and garbanzo beans (and the obligatory fried egg on top). So there you have it.

Waste not.

I’ve had folks ask me about the “big fans” they see in some vineyards, or why the overhead sprinklers are going when it still looks like everything is still in winter hibernation. And with the nights still plummeting into the 30s in some parts of the valley—and lower where I live—it seemed like a good time to talk about frost protection.

It starts with bud break, when the vines show their first signs of life since they went to sleep before Christmas. Sometime between March and April, depending on where you are, how late you pruned, and what varietal you’re farming, fuzzy green buds start to pop out on the vine. These buds become the leaves and canopy that will fuel the vine all summer and eventually produce the grapes that become that year’s wine. But in March and April, it can still be pretty cold. Especially in dry years like 2012 has proven to be so far. Those cloudless, still, starry nights are a major threat to the harvest (and to any farmer’s REM cycle) usually until mid-May.

There are a couple different ways the Hawkeses protect our vines from frost. The most obvious one are the fans, or wind machines are they are often called. These giant turbines mix the warm air from higher up (usually around 20-25 feet) with the cold air down below, and that helps to break up the inversion layer. The moving particles will usually be enough to keep the temperature from dropping below 32°F in most cases, though this is only a solution when it’s in the mid-20s. Below those temperatures, the air up top is too cold. (The other downside is that the wind machines are loud. Really loud. Jet engine comparisons abound this time of year, and they’re not far off the mark.)

The quieter solution, but one that has its own downsides, are sprinklers. There are a variety of systems that people use, but overhead is most common. Water generates a minute amount of heat when it goes through the freezing process, so the reason you’ll see the sprinklers on for long periods of time is because that reaction will generate heat for as long as you continue to apply water (and it will stop when you do).

Sometimes, with cold enough temperatures, the water will freeze on the vine; then the energy generated from freezing will create a layer of water that insulates the vine and buds from the ice, kind of like the wetsuits surfers and scuba divers wear. (The downside with sprinklers is that they use a lot of water. And in cold springs with below-average rainfall, when frost protection is most needed, water’s the one thing we don’t have much of.)

But when there’s enough, when the temperatures sit in the teens for nights on end, the result can be stunning.

Evening Edit: We got a comment on Facebook from a reader that I think is an important addendum, one that I opted to leave out initially in order to adhere to a self-imposed 500-word-maximum, which was my error and undermines the rest of this post. He pointed out that my last paragraph suggests that “frost protection presents a potential harm to anadromous fish are mostly outdated if not just false.” This is something I didn’t want to touch on because I am not familiar with the subject in great detail, only on the surface, but it was nonetheless unintentionally implied.

We moved our wind machines down to the Stone Vineyard from the Red Winery Vineyard because the Stone is more prone to frost this time of year, and with the below-average rainfall, the creek from which we have previously pulled water for frost protection—and the one which flows past my house—wasn’t just low, it was dry up until last month when we received record amounts of rainfall for the month of March. When I said “water’s the one thing we don’t have much of,” the potential danger I intended to reference was the lack of rainfall, not the use of water from creeks and rivers for crop protection. I apologize for the misconception.

The subject of using water for this purpose and the argument that it poses a potential threat to native fishes is a much bigger one than I could—or should—cover here. But if you would like to get a few more details, the Press Democrat published this article last October. It will give you a better idea about what Dave mentioned. And I for one would like to thank him for pointing out my mistake so that I can learn from it.

I graduated from college in May of 2008, which seems like a lifetime ago already. I did a third summer as music director at Four Winds, and then I came back home to start saving some cash so I could figure out What I Would Do With My Life.™ During that time, I went back to work for Carrie Brown at the Jimtown Store, which, as anyone who has ever been out to visit our tasting room in Alexander Valley knows, just happens to be next door.

The best part of working at Jimtown isn’t the killer food or the supportive environment, although those are both wonderful things for which I was immensely grateful during that year. No, the best part are your regulars. There was Julian and his double-shot mocha breve. Carolyn and her half a tuna sandwich on wheat with extra pickles. Alice with her turkey chipotle and grilled onions. Robert, who always comes in for a cup of coffee right around 9:30. Liz, who spends an hour or so with a bowl of soup every afternoon. These are your neighbors, the familiar faces that keep you coming back to work every day.

And among these faces was one with which you’re all probably familiar: sometimes blonde, sometimes brunette, but never without a bright smile, her cowboy boots, and pearls. Over the year that I worked at Jimtown, Corinne was someone I always looked forward to seeing (she’s a pulled pork sandwich without the roll, with potato salad instead of cole slaw, by the way. Oh, and iced chai in midwinter, too). Sometimes she would come in with then-baby Beatrice, sometimes on her own. But in the middle of a winter that was pretty cold and dark, while my friends from high school were finishing up the last of their undergraduate studies, and a time when I personally had way too much going on in my head, chats with Corinne were always the highlight of the day. In fact, on my lunch break, there was a good chance you’d find me in the Hawkes tasting room, probably being more of a distraction than anything else.

Summer of 2009 came and went. One last turn as music director, and then I packed up and migrated south to Franz Josef for the winter. And when I came back in May of 2010, Corinne was there with the same welcoming smile. And with even better news: if I played my cards right, she and I could be coworkers. I guess that worked out, because here I am. And it’s been wonderful working with her for the last eighteen months. She is the most sincere, patient, genuine person I know, whether it was the time I forgot to send wine for someone’s wedding and she had to take it in with her before work, or that time we were carpooling back from a Sons of Doug concert in San Francisco at 2 A.M. with me fast asleep in the passenger seat. Corinne has been my touchstone since I started working here. She’s been my sounding board. My voice of reason. My Encyclopedia Britannica (at least as far as the Wine Club goes). She’s also the only person I know who can use the phrase “spirit of aloha” and not make me roll my eyes.

And the reason I write all this is because, after four years with the Hawkes family, Corinne has decided it’s time to do the Next Thing™. We threw her a sendoff party at the Sonoma tasting room after Barrel Tasting last week that involved a lot of gluten-free grub and gin. There were tons of hugs and well-wishes from friends. My boyfriend Peter offered a rather bleak “tell her I said good bye” until I reminded him that we’ll see her next time we go visit his family on Oahu. It was a slightly bittersweet good bye, but Corinne’s excited to become a renewed resident of the fair state of Hawai’i, so if you’re ever headed down to Honolulu, be sure to check the beaches for our friend. She’ll be easy to find; just follow the sound of her cowboy boots and the spirit of aloha.