Notes From The Winemaker

Rescuing Haynes Budwood

I have undertaken a special project at our Estate vineyard to rescue and preserve the unique Pinot Noir selection from the Haynes Vineyard. Following an early-morning brainstorm, I prevailed on my long acquaintance with the vineyard manager at Haynes to ask him to collect some sticks of budwood for me from the fittest, oldest vines before they bulldozed the old block. He was quite happy to accomodate my request – thank goodness.

The Haynes Vineyard has been farmed by the same family since 1885. In the mid- to late 1960's Louis P. Martini advised Dunc Haynes to plant Chardonnay and Pinot Noir. Fernando Delgado, manager of the vineyard since the early 1970's, has told me that the Pinot Noir budwood came from Martini's own La Loma Vineyard in Carneros.

Louis P.'s father Louis M. Martini planted this Carneros vineyard in the late 1930's; a few years ago I asked his son Michael where Louis M. got the budwood. Michael told me his grandfather had not kept good records. But he recalled that Louis M. collected budwood from "everywhere", including perhaps from the great vineyards of Burgundy in the days before stringent importation restrictions. Michael's father Louis P. replanted La Loma in the 1950's, employing and further developing the concepts of clonal selection to the existing budwood as well as newly-acquired selections.

Many other California Pinot vineyards were established with cuttings taken from La Loma. Each set of cuttings taken to establish a new vineyard represented a unique sub-selction of the broader diversity of vines at Martini's Carneros site. The Haynes Vineyard was planted with one of these unique selections.

There are still vines today at Haynes that originated from the old Martini Carneros selection – Haynes has used wood from these oldest vines over the years to re-bud and replant throughout the vineyard. However the old selection is interspersed with newer clones, and I understand Dunc Haynes and his team plan to replant "our" area of the vineyard with Swan clone – a selection of which I am not particularly enamored. (Not to say the Swan wood doesn't make great wines in some sites, but in other sites the wines it yields are heavy, meaty and excessively "animal" – not what I am trying to achieve with my Pinot Noirs.) Westwood is done with this vineyard.

Which is why I am really excited to have rescued this unique selection of the old Haynes budwood: enough to graft vines for planting an acre or two at our Estate in 2007.

For a while now I have been rolling the thought around in my head that the so-called "Dijon" clones of Pinot Noir (that are currently the rage in California) may not be perfectly suited to our soils and climates. After all, they were selected for Pinot Noir typicite and early ripening in the terroirs of the Cote d'Or. Perhaps this is why the fruit from these clones seems to have higher sugar, higher pH and lower acid at harvest than fruit from some of the Pinot selections with a longer history in California (Swan, Martini, and Mt. Eden for example).

My personal jury is still out on whether the Dijon clones can produce really subtle, long-lived Pinot in California. Our presumtive Estate block of the Haynes heritage budwood will be a hedge against this possibility. Though frankly I don't know how the Haynes selection will perform in our vineyard, I do know that it will perform differently than the Dijon clones we have planted there.

And this heritage selection block will give me the opportunity to bottle a second Estate Pinot, distinct from our Dijon clone bottling. STAY TUNED! Look for this Haynes heritage bottling to go on the market sometime after 2014.

posted 12/02/2006 02:34:00 PM