Groundwater Helps Napa Vintners Weather Drought

(Wine-Searcher) - Many vintners in Napa Valley are sanguine about what could be a historic drought for California. In fact, the 2014 wines might even benefit.

Nobody was expecting a big crop anyway, after harvests in 2012 and 2013 that were both large and seemingly high quality. If the drought emergency of 2014 continues, there will certainly be smaller quantities of Napa Valley wine produced this year but they could be more intense.

Napa has had about 25 percent of its average rainfall since last June, said vineyard manager Garrett Buckland, and here in the middle of California's rainy season, Napa continues to have one warm, dry day after another.

But Napa has some large advantages over even successful regions like Sonoma, where the county water agency said last week the region is the driest it has been in 120 years.

For one thing, most of Napa Valley has groundwater under the soil, Buckland said, so the grapes don't have to rely on surface water, as is the case in many areas. "If I see a 10-foot drop in our water level, for most places, that's not a problem," Buckland said. The exception is Coombsville in southeast Napa Valley.

Perhaps more importantly, the goal of grapegrowers in Napa Valley is different from almost every other farmer in the world. In the San Joaquin Valley, growers of grapes (and everything else) want big plants with plenty of foliage to create big yields. In Napa, farmers trim the plants and drop half their crop because they want a small harvest of intensely concentrated grapes. Wet years are considered a problem, not dry years.

"We had drought in 1978 and '79, and those were great wines," said Elias Fernandez, a Napa Valley native who has been making wine at Shafer Vineyards for 25 years. "Our hillside vineyard is always in drought. We always have to give [the vines] water."