By Bruce Neyers

Tuesday 12th July, 2022

We’ve passed the summer solstice now, so it’s a good time to wander through the vineyards. Other than the harvest season, the period from mid-June to mid-July is the busiest for us. Ongoing projects these days include weed removal, vine watering, canopy management, sulfur dusting, and general vineyard maintenance.

Most important, though, is individual vine care. We look at each vine a minimum of six times during the growing season. We remove unwanted shoots and suckers, pluck the large basal leaves from the top of the trunk, train shoots up through the wires to help form the canopy, remove lateral shoots to encourage vertical growth, and most importantly, examine each vine for proper vigor, crop load, and any sign of disease. We rely on our vineyard manager Hugo Maldonado and his work force for these operations, and they are quick, decisive, and highly skilled. We are in the middle of the most labor intensive period of the season, as well as at the height of vegetative growth, so as we finish one pass through the vineyard, it’s time to go through again. The clusters are formed now, and the berries are beginning to swell into grapes. By August 1, they will have started to undergo veraison, and we’ll soon have a sea of red grapes surrounding us.

We normally get 36 inches or so of rain in the Napa Valley during the wet season that runs from October through April. This year we had only 24 inches, but that’s still a significant improvement over the 2021 vintage, when we had less than 12 inches. The vines will still grow well despite the lower moisture level in the ground, but the crop size will likely be less than normal. So far, it looks like we will have a slightly larger crop in 2022 than last year.

We’ve been a bit more concerned about the heat this season, as we had a warmer than normal June. That changed last week, however, as our famous Bay Area fog moved in, and we’ve had cold, foggy mornings for 10 days. That’s given us a chance to pause briefly, catch up on vine care, and dedicate some time to vineyard maintenance and general upkeep. We all enjoyed the break.

My mother’s parents were farmers on the Eastern Shore of Maryland, while Barbara’s grandparents were farmers in northern New Jersey, so neither of us grew up strangers to farming. Grape farming is highly specialized, though, and requires more direct contact with the plant than any other crop. That’s all part of the allure that vineyards seem to have. They just get into your soul.

One of the highlights of last month at Neyers is the annual bottling of our ÂME Vineyard Cabernet Sauvignon. This is a wine we make from the Cabernet Sauvignon grapes grown at the highest elevation on our property, a parcel that starts at about 800 feet and rises to a height of 1100 feet. It’s on a steep, south-facing slope planted in 2000. It sits on a rocky shelf of basalt, and the resulting fruit is magnificent. The wine we make from these grapes is our winery flagship. We call it ÂME, and we produce only a few hundred six-pack cases annually. ÂME is the French word for ‘soul’, but the word also contains the first name initial of our three children – Alexandra, Michael and Elizabeth.

The 2018 ÂME Cabernet Sauvignon was a wine selected by Wine Spectator recently for inclusion in a list of the top bottlings of Napa Valley Cabernet Sauvignon. It was awarded a score of93 POINTS, and James Molesworth had this to say:

“This has the profile of the vintage down pat, delivering a beam of focused and dense cassis, plum, and black cherry reduction notes that cruise along, while flashes of alder and sweet tobacco peak through. Ripe and solid, with a harnessed feel throughout. Best from 2023 through 2033. There were 277 cases produced.”