Family Owner and Winemaker Ben Casteel of Bethel Heights Vineyard shows Austin Beeman around his old vines. Specifically some own-rooted Wente Clone Chardonnay and Geneva Double Curtain Trellising.

Filmed on location at Bethel Heights Vineyards in the Eola-Amity Hills AVA of Oregon.

Enjoy the Video (12 minutes) or Read the Transcript below

Transcript:

So my name's Ben Casteel, I'm the winemaker and one of the family owners of Bethel Heights.

We're standing right in the middle of our vineyard on the Western side. We are in a block of Chardonnay that was planted here in 1977. These were the first vines that were planted at Bethel Heights.

This is Chardonnay that was taken out of the Wente Vineyard in Livermore, California. Cuttings literally just taken and stuck in the ground here 43 years ago.

So half of Bethel Heights is still own rooted and un-grafted. So when I say own rooted plant, all I mean is that it's not vinifera grafted on top of phylloxera-resistant root stock. To graft a grape vine, as my friend, Jason Lett, likes to say, you only need a very sharp knife.

You take a cutting, the buds on the bottom become roots, the ones on the top become leaves, and you have the genetically identical thing that you cut it off of. Okay. But what that means is, it's susceptible to the little tiny root laos called phylloxera that will usually let in a secondary pathogen that'll kill the vine.

The original plantings were 1977. And then when my parents bought the property in 1978, they planted a whole swath of Pommard in 1979. So half of the property is fairly old vines, un-grafted.

You can see with Wente, people sort of historically have sought this out because these are going to get bigger, but you can see the sort of hens and chicks, the big berries intersperse with little teeny tiny berries. The little teeny tiny berries rarely will have any seeds. This is mainly just skin and pulp. It's one of the reasons why people seek out Wente is because you get these hens and chicks.

You can get a lot of concentration with Chardonnay like this. The trick is that being on an own rooted plant, so, I mean, as you can probably tell, this isn't what a traditional grape vine in Oregon looks like. You can get a little closer, you can see these guys are probably almost five feet tall.

This is a Geneva double curtain. It was developed in Geneva, New York with the idea that you would have, you can see that sort of double arm to sort of fill out both sides of the fruiting wire. This was done primarily for fruitfulness, that you get more grapes when you can put out two different canes. So we alternate a single and a double hanging trellis. We alternate just because if it was a double and a double, it would just be an absolute jungle in the vine row.

This is one of the latest ripening things we have. I've been making the wine here since 2005. And the notion that we would bottle this separately, let alone that it would make the most expensive wine that we make, I would've laughed out loud probably even five years ago, but here we are. I think with warming weather, I mean, every vintage in Oregon between 2012 and 2018 was in some way or another defined by heat, we're standing here in 2021, a vintage that I very much think will be defined by heat. And with more growing season, we're able to get the Wente riper than we ever hoped we could. It used to be sort of many years ago that the Wente was sort of defined by the margin of viticulture, that we got the grapes as ripe as we were able to, never as ripe as we wanted to.

Whereas now with warmer weather, it's flipped around and now we can get this in most years as ripe as we want. Being own rooted it is susceptible to phylloxera. So this vine looks very healthy, lots of clusters. This is actually pretty balanced. We haven't done anything here yet, but if we walk up here just a little bit, with this plant, you'll start to notice shoots are all whole lot shorter. It's not as many clusters on the plant. Most of these basal leaves, this is more just burn from when it got really hot. But I mean, we can see that this vine is obviously weaker than the one we just came from. It's sort of bittersweet. I mean, usually the crop that we get off of a vine like this is very, very good because fewer clusters means that things are really concentrated. The sad part, of course, is that it's dying and we probably will never plant on a trellis like this again. I mean, this is sort of a relic of a bygone era.

The thought here also is, I mean, as you can tell, doing any farming here with a tractor is going to be a challenge. We can't hedge this with a tractor because we'd be taking off grapes. But the idea was that this was a trellis system you could do with fairly little mechanization. So we hedge this with a machete instead of a tractor if things get too vigorous. This plant looks like it was only hedged once. We can just simply cut it back. I mean, it's very much a by hand operation as opposed to a VSP where the fruiting zone is way down here. Here, everything's up top. It's also easier on people in that regard that, I worked in Burgundy a long time ago and having to bend down to pick grapes over and over again certainly takes its toll on taller people.

I think that was also a part of this was the personnel piece that it was just easy. And you can see sort of a hallmark of Wente, teeny tiny little berries. Now this, we just went through lag, so we now have hard seeds. And what we typically do is we'll take weights per plant and then we'll sort of guess how many plants we have, take an average cluster weight, and that way we know about how many tons per acre we're looking at here. This is a notoriously hard block to judge because we do have these clusters like this with teeny tiny little berries. There's also clusters maybe we can go look at in a minute that, I mean, I could probably fit two of these in my hand. There are others where I could probably only fit one in my hand. I mean, there is genetic variety in here.

It's been in the ground for 43 years. And I think with that comes some genetic instability, be it virus, be it environmental conditions to where things have changed, which is really interesting with a stalwart block of 43-year-old vines, that things are still dynamic and still changing. And yeah, I mean, it's one of my favorite things about this block.

It's sort of maddening because it's impossible to sample. It's one of our running jokes. We send our interns out here to get a representative sample and they come back with sort of a bewildered look on their face with a couple of teeny tiny little clusters and then one gigantic one. There is no good way to sample it. I mean, this is sort of beyond science in terms of us getting numbers to pick. Usually we just use our neighboring block as an indicator. So once we've picked that Chardonnay, we wait seven days and then come pick this.

So still on the same block of Chardonnay. But as you can see, these clusters are at least two to three times as big as what we were looking at. I had mentioned we were in lag. So usually when we do that, we'll weigh the cluster and then we do several different factors. We do 1.6, 1.88 and two, meaning that this cluster is either going to get 1.6 times as big, 1.8 times as big or twice as big, which means that all of these guys lying on top of each other is going to be all sorts of trouble if they do get that big, because obviously we're on an organic program here. And having clumping like this, it's great right now when it's nice and sunny, but if it rains, all of this can lead to rot because you're just giving water extra places to hide.

So thinning passes through here or, I mean, it's not just section by section, it's essentially plant by plant because, as we saw earlier, I mean, things don't all look, they're not the same here. So the instructions usually fall to my harvest crew rather than our typical vineyard crew to come through and do this just because it is fairly detailed work.

“And what would account for the fact that these are so different in size than the ones before?” - Austin

Genetic instability. I think Wente was the parent material of what became the 108 clone Chardonnay, which was a huge success in California. It was almost like it was selected like you would select cereal crops. So disease resistant, high yielding, and late ripening. It was a lot of what was planted here in Oregon early on. Great for California, but high yielding, late ripening for Oregon. In the eighties and seventies wasn't necessarily what anybody was looking for. So the clone essentially became a pariah, everybody tore it out. It was kind of blamed for why we had been making bad Chardonnay for a number of years. It coincided with David Adelsheim sort of negotiating getting the Dijon selections from the French ministry of agriculture brought into Oregon, which were smaller clusters, much more uniform. But it's funny, but what seemed like a good idea at the time sort of looking fast forwarding now to 2021, I wish I had a lot more of stuff like this that pushed deep, deep into the season, that held acidity, that kept balanced flavors.

I find, if we can move a little bit just right over here. So this is Dijon. This is planted in 1994. You can see we're on a vertical shoot trellis position here as opposed to a hanging trellis, more plants in the ground. So basically they kept this big wide row spacing, so 10-foot rows, and they just doubled the density, so where one plant came out, two went in its place. So you're also asking the plant to only ripen grapes to here as opposed, I can't even reach the end, to here. So the carbohydrate source for the plant here, you're counting on things getting all the way down here. So you are going to see things get to be a little bit more varied further down the cane, as opposed to here with tighter spacing where things stay much more uniform.

It's one of the very un-sexy stories of Oregon Chardonnay, but a true one that, while the clones changed, 108 was done away with, Wente, Draper, a lot of those were sort of seen as the wrong plant material, and the Dijon selections came in, the trellising all changed too. People were planting closer and closer together, sort of asking less of the plant to get a shorter canopy ripe. So I know as much as people love to sell clone, I think that the spacings also made a big, big difference.

And this is still considered pretty wide for the state now. Certainly the spacing in between the rows, but even the spacing in between the plants. Our older vines that are dying, do we maintain the trellis system? Say I have a sick plant here and then four healthy plants right next door, do I just tear this one out, and again, double the density but still keeping a 10-foot row space? It's one of those sort of debacles for a family business because, I mean, I think obviously you want to see these generational bottlings go on and on without just wholesale tearing something out, modernizing the trellis, and understanding that you're probably not going to get to bottle it under that name again for 15 years, 20 years.

So here you can see we're in a spot where we are looking at Wadensville planted in 1977. So again, own rooted vine. We haven't done any thinning here. This is sort of naturally what set has looked like in here. So pretty ragged and pretty sparse. This is our west block. We've done a single bottling of this, I think since 1995. It was called the Wadensville on the label at the time, but then the family thought that nobody could pronounce that. And so they switched it to the west block. And so the idea being that we can keep that label going with the older vines as long as they're viable, but still have baby plants becoming adolescent plants eventually in 20 years becoming adult plants when the rest of the block has ceased to be viable. So the idea is we can sort of keep these things going generation one, to me, generation number two, to hopefully somebody's children, generation number three.

FTC Compliance: I currently work for Cutting Edge Selections which represents Bethel Heights Vineyard in Ohio and Kentucky, but this blog and podcast are completely separate from that business relationship.

THIS IS EPISODE #81 OF UNDERSTANDING WINE WITH AUSTIN BEEMAN

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