Good morning. My name is Mitchell Klug. I’m the Vineyard Manager for Crushpad. And right now, this beautiful view, we’re standing at the Ink Grade Vineyard on the east side of the Vaca Range and the Howell Mountain.

Here at Ink Grade, there are close to 200 acres planted vineyards on the entire property, not all contiguous. They’re spread out across the property in and amongst what was forest and some range land or pasture land. The vineyard was principally planted in the very early 90’s which is one of the very unique factors of it. There are not that many older vineyards in Napa Valley anymore. Ink Grade is one of the first series of vineyards planted post filaxra which really started to occur in the Napa Valley first documented in 1989. So all through the 90’s, the vineyards were replanted as was the Ink Grade. The varieties that are grown here are principally Bordeaux varieties, Cabernet Sauvignon, Cabernet Franc, Petit Verdot and Merlot and they seem to do quite well here. It’s not a cooler climate. It does receive that benefit of elevation. And the effects of elevation on temperature as you can see, it’s very exposed. But again, the elevation really provides the benefit of having extremely hot days and having and having really ideal temperatures at night throughout the growing season to ripen this fruit to a really ideal relationship between bricks and phenolics to provide some very interesting wine.

The soils here are predominantly bressed dribble soils that is a specific soil series. These are volcanic soils. They are very well drained naturally. This is what I consider for Napa Valley at mid to higher elevation site, or anywhere from 1300 to 2000 feet which provides quite a significant temperature difference between this vineyard here at Ink Grade and the valley floor.

One of the other nicer aspects that separates the Ink Grade vineyard from other vineyards is it is certified organic and it’s farmed at such and has been for at least five years that I know of. Some of the things that they’ve done out here at Ink Grade is when it’s fall, trees dies, rather than act in a hurry to remove that material, they leave that dead fall to provide habitat for birds which are great insectivores. They have actually encouraged certain plants to grow, shrubs and forbs in order to also provide habitat for over wintering predatory insects and to provide diversity of habitat. In some situations, you do things like plant trap crops in order to divert pests, vertebrates or insects away from your crop.

I want to talk a little bit about the trellis system and the trimming here at Ink Grade. These vines are head trimmed and came pruned. So there is essential trunk of permanent vine structure and they form the head of the vine or the crutch of the vine. People use different terminologies for that. And then this is cane pruned which is probably a very good selection for this type of vineyard. And the reason why I think cane pruning is good is because one of the benefits that cane pruning provide you versus cordon pruning is it provides you the opportunity to deal with the changes or the seasonality of the vine and it provides you the opportunity to deal with the differences in soil vigor and vine vigor within a block or a row. You can treat each vine as an individual vine because the fruiting wood is replaced every year. You leave a new cane each year. The team here utilizes not only indicator of vine water stress like leave water potential where they’re checking on a weekly basis, the vine water status and neutron probes where they’re checking based on tubes in the soil with indicators at one foot incremental levels with what the soil moisture is and looking at those together. They are taking photographs around the middle of August which is when the vines are under full crop load and full canopy called NDV, Normal Digitized Vegetation index photos. And they are like what you would see on a paint splat. It’s the vineyard block overlaid with all different ranges of colors. And the lighter the color, the higher the stress level as indicated by the leaf area covered in the surface area. So when a grower looks at that, they can see within a given block the very ability if there is any between the vigor of one part of the block versus the other. And her at Ink Grade, being as the vines are 18, 19 or 20 years old, you don’t see quite as big a spike from year to year typically in the quantity of fruit.