A Look into the Climate of Boulder Bluff Vineyard

I’ve lived in the house at the Quarter Mile Lane Vineyard for almost 50 years now. In the beginning, as our family looked out our windows, most of the western border of our vineyard were the fir forests of our two neighbors. We hiked around in the trees, discovering wild strawberries and chanterelles at the right times of the year. Then in the later 1990s, perhaps in need of money, the lower neighbor had all the trees cut down. At first, we were devastated by the loss. Gone were the tall trees that offered us an escape from summer’s sun. But eventually, no forests became the new normal. And there was a positive. Our south block of Pinot noir at QML now got afternoon sun and the wines improved.

In 2000, the lower neighbor called us and said they were going to move. They wondered if we were interested in their property. I went over, walked the property with them and said “yes.” I convinced our partners, the Loackers, that this would be an amazing vineyard and they agreed. We planted it in 2003, eight acres in Pinot noir and two acres in Chardonnay. When we made the first wine from the vineyard, the Loackers named the vineyard “Boulder Bluff” for the incredible number of basalt rocks that had to be removed (more or less) from the steep surface of the property.

In the early years of this century, we knew about global climate change, of course. But the vintages of 1995, 1996, and 1997 had all been very rainy and were very much on our minds as we were deciding on what rootstock to use in this new vineyard. Gary Andrus of Archery Summit had come up with an amazing idea – graft our regular Pinot noir clones onto a rootstock that would make the grapes ripen earlier, before the rains of October. That rootstock was Riparia Gloire (RG,) and it would ripen grapes two or three weeks earlier than the normal rootstocks we were using. We decided to use RG for the whole vineyard, the Pinot and Chardonnay.

Now, you can see from the Google Earth photo that the Pinot noir section of Boulder Bluff slopes southwest, very steeply into the afternoon sun. Quite the opposite from the original block of Pinot on Quarter Mile Lane, just to the left of our house. It slopes to the southeast, which mitigates that heat. Now 19 years after planting, we know that Boulder Bluff Pinot (planted at 600 feet above sea level on RG rootstock and on a super-warm slope) ripens around the same time as our earliest Pinot 300 feet lower, at Calkins Lane Vineyard. In a warm vintage, Boulder Bluff blasts through veraison (the point in August when the grapes turn red) and moves to ripen its grapes amazingly quickly. Three or four weeks before Quarter Mile Lane next door. Of course, in cooler, wetter vintages the RG rootstock works as we envisioned in 2002.