The Wrath of My Grapes

A hard-learned winemaking lesson: Growing is the tough part

This was the year I coulda been a contender. Instead, here I am crying in my grape juice.

The 2014 harvest was going to be the one when my small, 100-vine plot of Syrah on a patch of earth in southern France was going to shine. I am not a professional winemaker so there was no hope of my wine being tasted and scored 95 points by Wine Spectator. But it was going to put a smile on the faces of friends and vignerons who drank it.

Today I have one word: fuhgeddaboudit.

What happened? Grape rot. While I was waiting for those little dark beauties to ripen in September, the Provençal sun disappeared, clouds came in, rain followed and voilà. Less than 10 percent of the crop was salvageable—enough to fill one picking basket. The rest? Damaged grapes oozing juice that was already turning to vinegar.

Before you start saying that winemaking is difficult, let me say: It's not.

I've made eight vintages at home with a fellow American wine lover here, producing and bottling about 125 bottles a year. People like it. One wine agent even offered to export it. We have never had a problem. We've fermented on native yeasts in food-grade plastic or steel, let the wines winter-over in glass (last year we got a small wood barrel) in my cellar and bottled before summer with just a touch of sulfites.

But here's our dirty little secret: We've used other people's grapes. My wine pal Ken has had the same problems as me with his 50 Cabernet vines (worse in fact), and our combined total of grapes has never filled more than half our fermenting vat. Every year Ken and I head about an hour away to a winemaker friend who lets us pick a bit from his excess of good fruit, in exchange for a day here and there of my harvesting labors.

We've discovered that red winemaking can be pretty easy if you start with great grapes. Our problem has been growing grapes anything close to great.

I started making wine for a simple reason. I write about wine and wanted to know it, up close. What are the daily decisions producers have to make? I wanted to understand the four seasons in my small vineyard and feel the excitement of the growing season and harvest.

The good news is that winemaking became demystified.

The bad news is that winegrowing utterly confounds me.

I planted the vines nearly a decade ago—Rhône Syrah clones professionally grafted onto sturdy 1102 Paulsen rootstock adapted for our calcareous soils. Of course I wanted to grow those grapes the way the old timers did—organically, with a bit of sulfur and copper sulfate judiciously applied to keep those molds and mildews at bay.

Yeah, well ….

One thing I learned is that you can't teach an old terroir new tricks. One street that abuts my vines was long ago named after the tree that grows like a weed at this end of our village: fig. And guess what? My wife and I have unstoppable fig trees (one is bigger than a house) that produce tons of fruit with no intervention from us. I suspect there is a reason that our village hasn't historically had vineyards.

Another thing I learned: Agriculture is hard.

Vines require attention—and physical labor—nearly all year round. Yet no matter how much babying I've given to my vines, come September a good percentage of fruit is unusable. In some dark moments, I have fantasized about bombing the whole vineyard with chemicals or planting genetically modified supergrapes. So far I have resisted. But this year's failure just about broke my heart.

Still, I'm not bitter. In the coming weeks, Ken and I will drive to the heart of the Provence vineyards and pick some beautiful grapes to make our 2014 wine. Only, it won't really be ours.