High Elevation & High Latitude Session at Unified Symposium 2010

[Prahlad]

As part of our symposium series, the Lake County Winegrape Commission and The Elevation of Wine hosted a special Friday session at the 2010 Unified Wine & Grape Symposium entitled High Elevation/High Latitude: Wine Growing on the Edge.

The day was broken into four sub-sessions exploring different definitions of high elevation and high latitude viticulture and highlighting some of the regions included by those definitions.

The first part of the morning session, moderated by Glenn McGourty of the UC Cooperative Extension, dealt with general environmental and climatic factors.  Climatologist Greg Jones from Southern Oregon University gave a broad introduction to how elevation influences weather and climate as well as some of its impacts on vine physiology.  Daily variations not only in temperature, but also humidity, are among the most important impacts, especially in hillside vineyards where the elevation changes from one end to the other.  Atmospheric density and the related issues of CO2 availability and intake and UV exposure were also discussed.

Next, Pat Bowen from the Pacific Research Center in British Columbia expanded the discussion to include the effects of high latitude as well, using the specific case of than Okanagan Valley in Canada situated between 49 and 50 degrees north latitude.  Because latitude affects many of the same environmental factors as both elevation and degree of slope, even oridinary vineyards at these high latitudes experience many of the same challenges as high elevation and mountainous vineyards at lower latitudes.

Vittorino Novello from the Univeristy of Torino and CERVIM next presented some of CERVIM's philosophy on heroic viticulture and gave an overview of the winegrowing regions in Europe that meet fit into the definition ofmaintain viticulture proposed by CERVIM, which takes into account slope and accessibility as well as elevation.  One of CERVIM's primary goals has been the official recognition and cultural preservation of this mountain vitculture by European government.

The second half of the morning's session dealt with winemaking quests.  First, John Buechsenstein of Sauvignon Republic Cellars described his quest to make a better and better Sauvignon Blanc which ultimately brought him to the high southern latitude regions in New Zealand and South Africa.  Randle Johnson from Hess and Bodega Colomé next outlined the quest turned obsession to create the world's highest elevation wine in Argentina's Calchaquí Valley, involving the establishment of a vineyard at over 10,000 feet above sea level.

Both parts of the afternoon session dealt entirely with specific case studies of high elevation vineyards in Northern Calfornia.  Bill Easton of Terre Rouge, Scott Harvey of Scott Harvey Cellars and Ann Kramer of Shake Ridge Vineyards described the difficulties and successes they'd experienced in their Sierra Foothills vineyards.  Eagle Point Vineyard's Casey Hartlip, Peter Molar from Obsidian Ridge and Kendall-Jackson's Randy Ullom gave case studies for their vineyards in Mendocino and Lake Counties of the California North Coast region.  Through all their varying experiences, each speaker coming from a different background and ending up with a high elevation vineyard for widely differening reasons, there was an agreement that high elevation viticulture involves an amplification of all the challenges of normal vineyards, from the impacts of weather to water availability to the correct timing of management decisions, these things were all described as "amplified" in the case of highelevation vineyards.  But at the same time, the speakers felt that the amplified challenges brought them in closer to their fruit and ultimately forced them to better fruit and better wines that they felt showed amplified characteristics that matched the amplified environment and challenges in the vineyard.

We'd like the thank all the speakers once again for their time and the insights they gave and also CAWG ans ASEV and the rest of the sponsors for hosting a great Unified Symposium this year.

I invite anyone who attended the session to post their thoughts and reactions here, any information or techniques that you thought were particularly interesting.  What did you away from the session?