From the Fields - Johnnie White

By Johnnie White, Napa County winegrape grower

We have a little chardonnay, some sauvignon blanc. We grow a little bit of everything, but we’re probably 85% cabernet sauvignon.

It’s really our quiet time in the vineyard. We’re preparing and hoping for a good rainstorm. We’re told we should be getting a few inches of rain, which is great. We’re checking all of our erosion-control measures for our hillside vineyards, making sure that the ditches are clean and we’re prepared for hopefully a rainy next week or two.

We’ll start pruning after the first of the year. We’re starting to put out our pre-emergent herbicides. All of our irrigation systems have been drained and are ready for the freezing temperatures. The cover crops are coming up nicely. If we get some rain this week, it’ll help that cover crop grow and help our reservoirs and wells recharge. We plant different cover crops based on the vineyard. We do some beans and some brassica. We also do erosion-control mixes that stabilize the soil and hold the soil on our hillside vineyards.

Our harvest was OK. It wasn’t a stellar harvest, but it was better than 2020, when everything was smoke tainted, and 2021, when yields were significantly reduced because of drought. Last winter we got enough water to fill most of our reservoirs. We still had some drought issues, but we fared much better than the last two years. The heat wave this past September did quite a bit of damage and reduced crop load quite a bit.

Our labor situation is not great, but we’re making do. We’re hoping for more labor. We were really hopeful for something to happen with the FWMA (Farm Workforce Modernization Act), and I just saw it announced that that’s dead. It would have been an immigration fix. We’re watching that closely, really hoping for something. We do use some H-2A workers, and the H-2A rates have risen significantly, making it more cost-prohibitive to use.