Standing on the ground looking up at the rockface of Bandelier National Monument, it’s hard to see past the architectural beauty. That Georgia O’Keefe palette of blue sky and red rock is punctuated with hundreds of arched entrances, dotted with lines of steps carved around them in the soft sandstone.
To access the dwellings, it’s a long hike followed by a series of wooden ladders. In the shift from wide angle to closeup, awe is pushed aside by pervasive heat. Sweat prickles the backs of knees and neck, and it seems impossible that people lived here without modern conveniences.
Entering the dwellings at last, the relief is immediate. Even on triple-digit days, the rock is sweetly dark and cool.
Over a thousand years ago, as Ancestral Puebloans shifted from nomadic subsistence to cultivators of corn, they built pits in the rock outcroppings to store excess harvest. Eventually crops of squash, beans, and cotton made it possible for them to live completely in one place, and they began to use those same rock storage rooms as homes. They were wonderfully sheltered from the sun yet retained heat through the punishingly cold desert nights. The community thrived, and the storage dwellings grew into a complex network of multi-storied homes.
Faced with the grandeur and mystery of an archaeologic site, the true brilliance of the adaptation can get lost. This community was not built to be beautiful, or to be visited as art. It is beautiful because people found a way to thrive in the face of the impossible extremes of desert life. The evidence of that ingenuity is, in the truest meaning of the word, monumental.
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In 2021, the second of three heat domes came mid-August, with fruit well into ripening and a projected high of 117 degrees.
When a grapevine gets this hot, the sun can bleach the skin of the berries, robbing it of essential character and color. The fruit is at risk of raisination, ruinous to that year’s vintage, and there is direct damage to the vines: desiccation, scorching, and death of the vine tissue have long-term impacts on the plant’s health.
In Oregon, we know how to play chicken with rainclouds at harvest. We learn a complex choreography of farming practices required to keep disease at bay. We smell whole clusters of fruit at the sorting table to account for the possibility of rot. What we don’t have much practice at is how to care for vines in the heat.
If you were a winemaker in the Willamette Valley on August 12th, your social media was flooded with images of the sun, of shimmering air, of extreme heat advisories…and lots of “ 🥵 🙏.”Our nervous systems are hard-wired to seek connection when they are stressed. This essential evolutionary trait pushes us to rely on the strength of community and generational knowledge to survive. It also explains why we broadcast hardship on social media when things get rough. Unfortunately, when the need for connection is met, our brains stop trying to solve the problem as our stress response is soothed by the pings of notifications from the comment section.
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A forecast, however slim, is an invitation and not a death sentence: I got on the phone and started making calls to every shade cloth distributor and every trusted Californian vineyardist I knew. I remembered seeing shade cloth at one vineyard, which they employed as an elegant response to preserving delicate but heat-loving grenache. Unsurprisingly, winemakers and growers in less temperate climes are well acquainted with severe heat, and I received a real education in a day.
Shade cloth was the obvious answer, but with time so short the reality of obtaining it was sobering. I was, I’ll admit, starting to panic. I called my best, most steadying and most generous winemaking friend, who was duly steadying and perfectly generous. He mentioned that they’d once had a similarly disastrous forecast and no protection at hand. They happened to work with a woman whose husband was employed by a restaurant supply store – on her tip, they butcher-papered the whole damn vineyard.
My next call was to vineyard manager, Jessica Cortell. Anyone else would have emphatically said no to me, with an added “that’s stupid, and impossible”. But Jessica, in her unfailing way, said, “Heck yes. And if you have any paper leftover, I might do it in my own vineyard, too.”
At the first light of the hottest day, Jessica, our team, and her crew unfurled six hundred and sixty thousand linear feet of white paper. By 10 am, the vineyard streamed with white striping, like so many ribbons down the vinerows. And as the dome lifted three days later, we took the paper down in great armfuls, and brought it, by the truckload, to the recycling center.
The papered vineyard was ephemeral, but these wines are its monument. They stand in their whole, undamaged beauty as a clarion call to keep asking, keep adapting, keep learning, keep finding our way to possible. Together.
~Maggie
