Vineyards

Location
All Jarvis wines are produced from estate vineyards, located high above the city of Napa, in the beautifully rugged mountains between Mt. George and Milliken Canyon at the southeastern end of the Napa Valley. The vineyards are planted in gently sloping meadows one thousand feet above the valley floor. As the cool maritime air passes over the Carneros flats and begins flowing into the valley, it falls about seven degrees in temperature for the thousand feet of vertical rise. As such, our vineyards tend to be cooler by several degrees than the famous Carneros region! These cooler temperatures allow a long “hang time,” permitting a long, slow fruit maturation for maximum flavor and concentration at harvest.

Varietal Plantings

*The Lake vineyards are so designated because these vineyards are in the nightly land breeze patterns of rather significant lakes on the estate. One vineyard area is directly influenced by Lake William breezes and the other by Lake Leticia (the two lakes being named after the owners).
*Our original 25 acres of vineyards were planted in 1985 on AXR1 rootstock. Phylloxera was found in 1993 on a few vines and by 1994 this insect had spread into the rest of the vineyard with sporadic infestation hitting hard in some areas. Replanting started in Spring 1996 with rootstock which is resistant to Phylloxera. In the meantime, the extra struggle of the vines produced some exceptional quality wine!

Soil
The vines are planted in well drained rocky soils, full of minerals of volcanic origin. With soil depths of only two and one half to four feet, the vines are simply not capable of producing the high yields of some of the valley floor vineyards. Unique in its development, one of the Jarvis’ vineyards was developed utilizing the cave tailings! First we removed the topsoil from the valley, layered down the tailings and later topped with a mixture of the tailings and the topsoil that had been stock-piled. The big advantage of this laborious technique is that we could set the soil depth to our desired two feet and develop a hard pan below the soil for drainage between layers.

Clones
Great effort was made to select clones which produce small berries. Small berries with their greater percentage of skin (where the color and flavors are developed) to juice ratios significantly enhances the intensity of the wine.

Vine Spacing
The spacing for the shallow soils in our mountain vineyards is 7' x 11', resulting with only 566 vines per acre. This spacing is unlike many vineyards which plant more than 2000 vines per acre in order to control vegetal vigor.

Planting & Trellising
Balanced sun exposure for optimum ripening is the basis of both our planting and trellising methods. Row orientation is magnetic North which, due to Napa’s 17-degree easterly declination, favors the morning sun exposure over the hotter afternoon sun. This helps to achieve uniform ripening on two sides.

Most of the vines are trellised on an Extended Lyre divided canopy system (named after the ancient musical instrument). By supporting the canopy in two vertical planes, the grapes receive both morning and afternoon light. This eliminates any possibility of green or vegetative flavor and also allows the grapes to obtain great color.

In some soils we use a Geneva Double Curtain(GDC) trellising system. This system is used to achieve the smaller berries that come from less vigorous vines. The small berries have a higher skin to juice ratio and since the flavor and color of the wine all comes from the skins we end with a more full bodied wine.

"Every aspect of grape growing and winemaking has been fundamentally questioned and re-examined in recent years, and I have been a very serious student of these world-wide discussions. Among these issues are planting density and canopy management; how to achieve a harmonious balance between the leaves and the roots to produce perfectly ripe grapes.”

Leaf Removal
Because of our advanced canopy construction, leaf removal is less critical in Jarvis vineyards than in vineyards employing other style canopies. Only discretionary leaf removal is practiced to achieve the final bit of sun exposure to our grape clusters.

Crop Thinning
A most important element in the Jarvis vineyard management is “crop thinning”. Even though this technique involves the throwing away some of the years fruit, it is justified by the fact that it enhances the quality of the remaining fruit to be harvested.

Irrigation
Our “normal” rainfall is approximately 25" of rain per season. Due to shallow, well-drained soil, we can control the root moisture during the growing season by a dual irrigation drip system. One portion of our dual system gives limited water to our typical plants. A second portion of the system provides additional irrigation to those more shallow soil plants. The net result is that we can keep all our vines irrigated, but at the same time absolutely minimizes the application of water so as to improve grape quality. Our dual irrigation system also gives a more uniform maturation which is one of our key winery goals.

We have incorporated a cover crop using native grasses to help retain our topsoil from being eroded by the rains, but most importantly to assist with better vine water management by means of grasses which extract the subsoils’ moisture.