I was out in our Lodi Zin vineyard with our grower, Kevin Soucie, a week ago checking on the grapes, complaining about the weather and watching the crew do some pretty intense leaf pulling. The crop load this year is wild. We were looking at a potential crop of 10 to 12 tons per acre, even in our 1916 block (92 year old vines.) - easily more than twice as much grape as we want on the vines.

Our Zinfandel vineyard is grown as ‘head-trained’ or self-supporting vines. Spacing is 8′ by 8′. On these vines there are generally 20 to 25 ‘arms’ with, ideally, two fruit-bearing shoots per arm with one cluster of grapes per shoot.

On trellised vines (using wires for support) you have two, sometimes four, ‘cordons’ or arms with 6 to 8 nodes per cordon and two fruit-bearing shoots per node with one cluster of grapes per shoot.

We were seeing four to five fruit bearing shoots per arm with four to five clsuters per shoot. Crazy heavy. It’s kinda hard to see in the first picture, but you’re looking at about 10 clusters when you should be seeing two or three. The immature clusters were already huge, as long as my hand - 8.5 inches. The primary cluster and the ‘wing’ as Kevin calls it, were almost the same size and the shoulders were already as big as clusters of Clone Six Cabernet. There was a considerable amount of shatter but when the grapes start to mature and fill in the shatter will aid in opening up the clusters

Kevin said he hasn’t seen this much fruit on the vines for 15 years. There’s no real way to explain why the crop load is so heavy this year. Could be lack of spring rain, could be a “light” crop last year…. no single reason explains it, but there are way too many grapes on the vines for a quality harvest.

Four to five tons to the acre is optimal production for our block of Zinfandel. More than that and the grapes don’t develop their best flavors and less than that doesn’t make much difference between “wow” flavors and “wow” flavors in the finished wine.

The fix to excess crop loads is easy but can get expensive. Essentially you just send the crews through the vineyard and reduce the crop by cutting out the excess fruit.

How is the vintage of 2008 looking? Too early to tell in Lodi. The weather has been good, but temperatures are trending cooler than ‘normal.’ Our Foothills sources suffered minor frost damage this past spring. Napa is looking at a very light year due to frost damage and I’ve heard that some people are already writing off ‘08 Napa as a “bad” year. That’s crazy talk at this point. Much depends on the weather between now and September/October.