[Noozhawk’s note: In early February 2021, Will Henry told Noozhawk that he was about to plant the first estate vineyard for Lumen Wines, the label he co-owns and produces with Lane Tanner, and we jumped at the chance to document the process from Day One. Following is the 11th and final story in a series about the life of a new vineyard by Noozhawk contributing writer Laurie Jervis and photographer Len Wood.]
More than a year has passed since my first column about Warner Henry Vineyard in the Santa Maria Valley.
In that time, vineyard owners Will Henry and his wife, Kali Kopley, have absorbed details about irrigation, their well and its electrical requirements; planted row crops amid the ongoing drought; accepted welcome advice from famed viticulturist/winemaker Randall Grahm; and learned just how much havoc gophers can wreck on a young vineyard.
The couple were also “gifted” pinot noir grapes from a vineyard about a half mile down the road. That seven-acre site belongs to businessman Doug King, whose primary residence is Bend, Oregon.
During a prior vintage, another winemaker declined King’s grapes and refused to pay.
Frustrated, King didn’t spend any money to prune, water or spray his vines against powdery mildew for more than one entire year. Yet somehow the pinot noir not only survived, but thrived, and Henry split the grape loot with several fellow winemakers, and christened the site “Wild King.”
Lumen Wines, the wine label co-owned by Henry and Lane Tanner, will have its first estate vineyard in Warner Henry, a 5-acre vineyard on 11 acres that Henry and Kopley purchased in 2018.
The project has been years in the planning, and was a dream of Henry’s late father, businessman Warner Henry, who died in August 2020.
Kopley and Henry also own Pico at the Los Alamos General Store, and the restaurant doubles as a tasting room for Lumen.
About those gophers: Female gophers can birth as many as six babies up to three times each year, meaning they are plentiful wherever plants are rooted.
These pests easily rank as the biggest threat to new vineyards because they eat the vines’ roots, killing the plant. While cats, dogs and coyotes will hunt gophers, owls and other birds of prey are a gopher’s worst enemy.
Enter owl boxes.
Vineyard owners — and farmers in general — hoist owl boxes on steel or wood poles or in trees to encourage the raptors to nest and regularly hunt gophers, rats, mice and squirrels.
Many vineyard owners rely on pesticides and traps to kill gophers. Since Warner Henry is farmed organically, pesticides are off the table, and traps require labor to set and check.
When I visited Henry in late April, he’d bought patterns of owl boxes from a Central Valley company founded by the late Steve Simmons, a retired teacher.
“He has a cool history,” Henry said.
During his career, Simmons, a resident of Merced, utilized students to help build more than 10,000 of the boxes for owls and ducks, and banded those who resided in those boxes.
The six boxes Henry is using contain two “rooms” — an entry room and a nesting space. They measure 13 by 16 by 23 inches, with an entry hole that’s nearly 4 by 5 inches, he said. The plywood boxes employ wood screws and glue, and are hinged on top for easy cleaning.
Each box has grooves below the opening to allow “purchase” by incoming owls’ talons, he noted.
Henry will place four of them atop poles eight- to 12-feet high at the corners of his property, and at about the same height in a tree or two closer to the house.
I called Kimberly Stroud, executive director and founder of the Ojai Raptor Center, with questions about common owls and how they hunt gophers.
The Ojai Raptor Center is a 501(c)(3) nonprofit organization that rescues, rehabilitates and releases birds of prey and other wildlife, and offers educational programs. The center also crafts and sells owl boxes, Stroud said, and for a homing fee, offers a raptor release program to suitable properties with existing owl boxes.
Barn Owls are prolific, Stroud said, and when safe in “established owl boxes,” each year the females can lay up to three “clutches” (a full set of eggs), each hatching five or six owlets.
Working as a “team,” owls will kill thousands of gophers, rats and squirrels in an average year, she noted.
The body count Henry shared with me was “1,000 small mammals each year” per owl. “And I’m really hoping those small mammals will be (our) gophers!”
He expressed hope 2022 will mimic last year and bring cooler summer weather to Warner Henry and Wild King vineyards, resulting in grapes with plenty of natural acidity.
At Warner Henry, the Italian varietal ruchè was planted just months ago, but the pinot noir vines there will reach “second leaf” this fall and in theory will have clusters mature enough for a rosé or “pet nat” sparkler.
Pet nat, or pétillant-naturel, is a wine bottled before primary fermentation finishes, creating a natural sparkler without additional yeasts or sugar.
Would Henry and Tanner consider making a pinot noir pet nat this fall? “That’s up to Lane,” he said.
We agreed I’d check back come fall, and I bid adieu, leaving Henry to craft boxes to attract owls to his site to make a dent in the gopher population.
— Laurie Jervis tweets at @lauriejervis and can be reached via winecountrywriter@gmail.com. The opinions expressed are her own.
