Damon, Rebecca and baby Sophia among their Pinot Noir vines

Organic, sustainable practices in a new local vineyard

In this week of thunder and rain, it’s pleasant to think back to a golden haze of a day on November 1, when I drove to the heights of the Dilworth Loop to visit the Alli Lanphear Farm and Vineyard.

Here, on fives acres that were farmed for decades by the Hoshi family, you can see a new beginning. Slopes that had gone over to scotch broom has been cleared, then planted in cover crop or left to grass. A new house now crowns the hill, fronted by flowers, warmed by sun, overlooking row after golden row of Chardonnay, Pinot Noir, and other trellised wine grapes. 

It’s easy to see this as another of Ron Irvine’s “sunny slopes” endowed with the perfect exposure for growing wine.

Damon Lanphear and Rebecca Alli Lanphear come out of the house to greet me. Little Sophia rides on Mom’s hip. Young couple, new kid, new house, big dreams. But as soon as we walk over to the new half-acre where new vines will go next year, I gather from the talk that farming, to them, is NOT new.

Learning by Doing

Damon is pointing out the cover crop. “We always start with cover crop: This is a, a—”

“Leg/oat,” Rebecca throws in.

“Yes, a legume/oat annual mix.” Damon picks up. “You lose a growing season, but you gain reduced weed pressure from perennial weeds, you break up the sod, you add structure to the soil.”

“We like to learn by doing,” Rebecca told me, “I began as an intern at Hogsback Farm ten years ago and worked there for a year and a half. Damon and I had a personal plot on a portion of their farm, and as we have always been interested in experimenting, we planted spelt, quinoa, amaranth, and a “three sisters” garden.” [That's the Navajo practice of growing beans, corn, and squash together for mutual support: the corn supports the climbing beans, the beans provide nitrogen, the squash shades the ground.]

This is not their only claim to experience: they’ve already made wine, beer, and mead, they’ve joined the Puget Sound Wine Growers Association, and they have gone to workshops through the Washington State Ag Extension office in Mt. Vernon, which serves as a research and education station for Puget Sound viticulture. 

They also toured France’s Burgundy wine country by bike in May 2008, seeing, learning, sitting down with wine growers, tasting their wine and being inspired. And they’ve tasted their way through wines recommended for our region—in some ways, deciding to buck the recommendations and plant for the wines they prefer, such as Chardonnay.

Developing the vines

We walk over to the Chardonnay vines—perhaps the only on Vashon and at eleven rows, definitely the largest planting. As we walk up and down the rows, we talk about spacing, watering, and vine development. 

The vines, “in their third leaf” are on three-foot centers, trellised along twin parallel rows six feet apart. New cover crop bristles in 4-6″ growth underfoot. I’m surprised to see drip-lines tied up to the 2-foot height trellis wire, but Damon explains “that’s both to give more trellis support and to get underneath to weed.”

He talks about “devigoirating the vines. Stressed vines make better wines. When the plant is stressed, it doesn’t grow such a full leaf canopy. When the canopy is open, more sun reaches the fruit, and that sunlight and airflow also protects against powdery mildew and fruit rot.”

I mention sulfur-dusting as a protection against mildew, which prompts Damon to expand upon the difference between organic wines “which among other practices, means no sulfites are used to produce the wine, and organic growing, where you can use sulfur to guard against diseases like powdery mildew.”

Rebecca cut in. “That IS part of our goal: we want to do organic, sustainable practices in the vineyard. 

Developing the soil

Deep in the rows of Pinor Noir, I reach down and scoop up a handful of soil the color of milk chocolate, ask about it. Damon says, “It’s an ‘alderwood-gravelly’ soil, basically a gravelly, sandy loam.” 

“We had a trench for our water-lines cut across the property, running in front of the house, so we could see down six feet, all that way,” says Rebecca. “It was amazing how much it changes, but basically, six feet down, it’s beach sand.”

“You feel how spongy and soft the soil is—like applesauce?” she continues. “That’s the tilling: it leaves the soil without any structure. You have to ‘clean cultivate’ the vineyard its first couple years to prevent any root competition from other plants.”

They started with a cover crop that covered the ground for a full year. In the second year, after turning under that first cover crop, they cleared the ground of all growth and planted the vines. For two growing seasons after that, they kept the soil “clean cultivated” so the roots of the young vines had no competition for nutrients.

At the end of the vine’s third year, the Lanphears planted two kinds of cover crops in alternating rows. In the odd rows is a perennial cover crop, New Zealand White Clover, which doesn’t run like other clovers and can be mown for tractor access to the rows.

In the even rows, the Lanphears have planted an annual cover crop of peas and vetch. These annual rows will be plowed under before the vines break into bud, hopefully with a chisel plow whose parallel tines will pull green matter under without pulverizing the soil’s structure. 

Both cover crops help reestablish a living soil structure that promotes drainage, holds nutrients, and brings oxygen to microbial soil life. 

For the rest of each summer, Damon plans to follow a European practice he saw in Burgundy: after plowing, these rows will be replanted in annual flowers like sunflower, lupine, and poppies to encourage beneficial insects. This is known as Integrated Pest Management, an organic practice standard. “In Europe, the red poppy is now a symbol of organic practices,” he says. “The vineyard should be alive.”

Developing the Farm & Winery

Their ultimate dream, I learn as we sit down around the kitchen table, is to produce 100-200 cases of Pinot Noir, Chardonnay, and other wines at affordable prices. They also want to develop other value-added products like pickles, vinegar’ed products,  miso and to collaborate with other Vashon food producers to create an alternative, integrated experience  in the same spirit as Sea Breeze Boucherie.”

Right now, they’re in the process of facility design, with plans for a barn, barrel storage, a full winery, a place for people to come try their wines and other local products.

I ask about the presence of Chardonnay, along with the much-adopted Pinot Noir. “We asked ourselves first, do we like it, can we be excited about it. Chardonnay has this troubled history: it’s associated with Napa practices of pushing toward fat, buttery, cloying tastes. This wine has more acids, minerality, a broadness on the palette that has been lost in the ‘message of chardonnay’. We want to become part of that movement to resurrect Chardonnay, of making an interesting white.”

Rebecca says, “We intend to follow organic and sustainable growing practices, but we may not opt to get organically certified. We probably won’t make certified-organic wine due to our use of sulfites and commercial yeast; however, as we progress, we intend to try winemaking without those additions.”

Many projects are ahead of the Lanphears. They’ve learned a lot already, but there’s much still to do, to experiment with and test, to see how well they can produce wine and how the public takes to it. But they seem like good caretakers of a land that once yielded much. Good luck to them.

Golden October light rakes over the grape vines. 

A breeze flutters the yellow and blue tablecloth, as our hostess sets down a tray of artisan cheeses. 

Friends yammer in French, raise glasses of ruby-red wine, toast the host.

Provence? Côtes du Rhône? No, it’s Maury Island, and we’re here to harvest Bill Riley’s Pinot Gris grapes.

Bill Riley retired from the EPA a couple years ago, determined to “finally get serious about this grape-growing/winemaking thing.” Back in the 70s, he’d come to the West Coast from New Jersey with his friend Rudy Marchesi to work in the wine business. Rudy’s efforts didn’t take immediately—he returned to Jersey for awhile—but today he owns and runs Montinore Vineyards in Forest Grove, the fifth largest vineyard in Oregon. 

Meanwhile, Bill met his wife, moved to Seattle, bought property on Maury Island—and by 1980, had planted a quarter-acre in 13 different varieties of wine grape.

In 2000, tired of “really lousy wine”, he ripped out all the vines, took a viticultural course, and replanted his acreage in Pinot Noir and Pinot Gris. Both are grapes that prefer cool weather, which is what the Island usually gets. The results have been good, and now he has plans to grow the vineyard by a half-acre a year. Maury Island Winery got its official winery license from Washington State in July, 2008.

But on this Indian Summer afternoon, October 4th, it really felt more like an afternoon in the French countryside: a day to enjoy with friends, good wine, and slow dining en plein air. 

We arrived to “bon joir!” from a tall, slim man who turned out to be Beaudoin from Belgium, an old friend of the Rileys. Soon Bill Freese the baker and his partner Bea Mann arrived, laden with a big round of cassoulet and a pan of bread molded into a grape cluster. Add Cory and Jason, Larry and Larry to fill out the crew.

Riley had his equipment set up on the sunny deck: a red steel crusher with a funnel top, a wooden-slatted press that could handle about four gallons of grapes at a time, three five-gallon glass carboys standing by to receive the juice, and a tractor loaded with shallow yellow plastic crates for we pickers. 

Around 3pm, the “crew”—some reluctant to be parted from their wine glasses—walked uphill to the top of the original vineyard, where six rows of Pinot Gris vines were planted. We stood around Bill as he handled out red felco hand pruners. “You’ll looking for grapes that have taken on red and blue tints—leave the clusters that are mostly yellow.” 

Two or three to a row, we pickers spread out, crouching next to the fan-espaliered vines to snip the crowded clusters of grapes. Unlike the trellising in a “T” that I’d seen at Monument Farm, Riley had chosen to keep his grapes closer to the ground—a technique taking advantage of ground-reflected heat. The grapes were small, tender of skin, with seeds that, if the grape was ripe, had turned brown. We were done before half an hour was up. 

Beaudoin drove the loaded-up John Deere back to the house, where the rest of us resettled around the “groaning board” of food and drink. Freese had brought a duck confit he’d made as part of the quest for a authentic cassolet: it was salty, a little chewy, edged with fat and made me thirsty. Luckily, there were several bottles and plenty of volunteers to open them. “Ooo, we’re into the Vacqueyras already,” said Cory, leaning in for a glass. 

Before the crush, somebody weighed each yellow tray of grapes on a scale and noted the weight on a clipboard. The total yield was close to 300 pounds of grapes. Then he or Beaudoin hoisted the crate over the crusher’s feed and let the grapes fall, all a bangety-clang, into the crusher’s maw.

To my surprise, the grapes came out the bottom barely cracked open, not “crushed” to a pulp like I’d imagined. The stems went through the crush as well: Bill said this was to hold the mashed grapes open within the press so that there would be channels for the juice to run out and through the press’s oaken staves. 

Beaudoin scooped the slightly-mashed grapes and coaxed them into the tiny press. When Bill knuckled down on the first grapes, the juice ran free and thick into one of the kitchen’s stew pots. As the juice ran into one kitchen kettle after another, Bill filled a small glass and held it into the sun. This is the precious “must” that will ferment: it was a milky amber, glowing apricot. 

It tasted like an unusual apple juice, and I asked him about its sugars. “The brix had reached around 20,” he said, “which is a little less than the traditional Pinot Gris. But since I want to turn much of this in to crémant—that’s a champagne-style wine—I want less sugar and more acid, more tannin, so it won’t be as explosive as a regular champagne.”

Once the first run had dribbled to a drip, round blocks were set upon the press’s wooden plate. A pipe, fed into a ratchet and turned, applied enough extra pressure to squeeze every drop of juice from the grapes.

We left in the late afternoon, after the pressing had slowed and three carboys had been filled. The juice will spend a week or two fermenting in the carboys; once the fermentation has thrown off most of the carbon dioxide gas, Bill will transfer the juice to oak barrels to age for a year. 

By next spring, he’ll sample the developing wine and decided whether to bottle it as is or re-ferment it into a sparkling crémant, which will require another year to mature.

Once he builds up an inventory of bottles, Riley hopes to open the winery occasionally (and by appointment) starting in spring 2010. A web site should be up by then. And he’ll have another half-acre of Pinot Noir ready to harvest next year, with new half-acre plantings planned.

Watch for my article on new Vashon vineyards either here or in the Beachcomber soon.

To read about an earlier bottling of Pinot Noir grapes from Monument Farm, see the May 28, 2008 article  ”In Search of the Holy Grail…” and here’s the link:  http://www.pnwlocalnews.com/vashon/vib/lifestyle/19295354.html