It’s a rare warm summer morning at the Peter Martin Ray Vineyard 2,000 feet above Saratoga. Rick Anzalone walks the rows of grapevines holding an Italian cigar in one hand and snagging at three-foot-high weeds with the other. The weeds have flourished in this cool summer’s weather, sapping nutrition from the soil and from the chardonnay crop he is growing.

Anzalone is a longtime local viticulturalist whose father was a grower in Sicily. With weathered and permanently tanned skin—a testimony to the 30-plus years he’s worked among the vines—he smirks at the beginning and end of every thought, and can’t help but slip a few curse words in between. He walks at a steady pace, stopping here and there to pull unwanted leaves from the vines, joking sparingly and puffing his cigar.

Anzalone clearly loves his job, but this summer it’s been too much like work. “This year has been a challenge trying to second guess the weather,” he says. “Sometimes you’re at the mercy of the season. Climate is what you expect; weather is what you get.” Santa Clara County vineyards are coping with the fallout from late spring rains that shattered a portion of the crops. (Growers use the term “shatter” to describe what happens when crops are too wet and cold during bloom to set seeds and produce fruit.) They’re also negotiating cooler-than-average summer temperatures that have led to overgrowth and a late harvest.

The past two summers in the Bay Area prove that “global warming” was renamed “global climate change” for good reason. While the Midwest, the Northeast, and the Central Valley roast, local temperatures have been dropping.

The numbers don’t tell the whole story. Bob Benjamin, who runs the National Weather Service’s regional observation program, says this season’s average high temperature in the Santa Clara Valley is two degrees below the normal 81.9. That might not seem like a big difference, but it is.

The two-degree drop is a result of a persistent low-pressure trough that has parked itself offshore. “The air masses are not migrating as frequently as usual,” Benjamin says,  pointing out that this is the very same atypical weather system that has anchored the heat wave in the Midwest.

“This trough has been stagnant on the West Coast, feeding the warm air in the central part of the country,” he says. “And nothing is moving. It’s all in connection.”

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Wine-grape grower Ron Mosely, who’s worked in the industry for more than 30 years, says that out of the 60 vineyards he oversees in Santa Clara and Santa Cruz counties, more than half have been hit hard by the cooler weather.

“You don’t have full clusters this year,” Mosely says. “Rather than about 200 berries per cluster, there’s half of that this year. Some of the clusters only have 25 berries.”

With some exceptions, that means local vineyards will yield half the normal average of three to five tons per acre.

Some of California’s first premium wine grapes were grown in the Santa Clara Valley, and for a time this area competed with Napa and Monterey as a top wine producer. While many of the area’s vineyards have been nudged out by office campuses and housing developments, local wine-grape growers produce upwards of $10 million worth of fruit for California’s $18.5 billion wine industry. Last year that number dropped to $7.5 million, and this year’s harvest will be even less.

And in coming years, when the 2011 vintage begins to show up on shelves, consumers will likely be paying more for a bottle of locally grown David Bruce Pinot or Clos LaChance Chardonnay.

Mosely says the fruit that is left this growing season is still of good quality—-; there’s just not much of it. To make matters worse, crops are two to three weeks behind harvesting schedule.

“Some of my clients are computer executives and they can easily set a release date,” Mosely says. “In farming you want to set a time for harvesting but you can’t. These are things you don’t know. You have to wait till it’s ready.”

Anzalone remains stoic about the situation. “A lot of farmers are living on the edge,” he says. “When you go into a partnership with God, you’re going to get the short end of the stick once in a while.”

Although each growing site is experiencing the season in its own way, depending on geography, management and other somewhat mysterious factors, many of the Santa Cruz Mountains vineyards—60 percent of which are in Santa Clara County—have experienced a similar effect.

Prudy Foxx, a viticulture consultant who works with many of the area’s leading wineries, says yields are down 30 percent for all varietals except chardonnay.  “There are some who have no yield problem at all, there are others who lost everything,” Foxx says. “It’s hit-and-miss based on location and weather.”

Weather Beaten
The cold summer’s moisture and lower amounts of fruit have turned some crops’ canopies into a jungle. In another vineyard where Anzalone works, vines reaching for the sky shake as workers wrestle them into submission.

“You can almost hear them at night,” Anzalone says. “If you came out here with a flashlight, you’d see it. They look like they grew almost a foot overnight.”

Foxx has witnessed similar overgrowth in many of the vineyards she manages.

“It’s an expensive year because you still have to clean out the leaves in the cool wet mornings,” Foxx says.

When doing “canopy management,” or trimming overgrowth, the weather’s mood swings are something to fear; in cold weather a grower can trim the leaves to give the grapes more sunlight, only to have all their exposed fruit zapped by hot weather the next day.
“It’s a delicate balance,” she says. “We’ve trained crews that know how to do it, but it’s expensive.”

The increased moisture that causes growth also creates a greater need for money, time, and in some cases chemicals to prevent mildew.

The natural remedy for the problem is hot weather—Mosely points out that there haven’t been enough hot days to dry out the problem.

Despite the profound impact of the cooler weather, Anzalone doesn’t think this season qualifies as a complete disaster. “In every season there’s some aspect of the weather you’re not completely happy with,” he says.

Anzalone has reason to be relatively sanguine. The Peter Martin Ray Vineyard, above Saratoga, stands on a ridge with clear views of Oakland and Mount Diablo, well above the fog that creates even bigger problems for growers. And Santa Clara County vineyards don’t face some of the problems that Northern California growers do, such as frost. “Those guys are as nervous as a hooker in a church,” Anzalone says.