September 24 2007
I would hazard a guess that you could spend a month of Sunday’s in a wine magazine archive from the last twenty years and still not come up with two magazine articles from two different magazines published in the same month that referenced hawks in the vineyard.
Odd, I know. I thought so, too. Sometimes the romantic story of the winery is so often featured that the downright more interesting aspects of vineyard life are downplayed.
Forget hand-sorting fruit and natural fermenting, tell me about owls picking off gophers in the vineyard.
But, I digress …
The September Business 2.0 article featuring Fred Franzia used a hawk as a metaphor for the way Franzia conducts business, saying:
(in reference to Franzia) … Looking up at a hawk flying high over his fields, he wonders whether it doesn’t have a better life than we do.
{in reference to Franzia admonishing the author about “real life”} … This real life comes up constantly, second only to the wars. Real life is a hawk, or the tractor trailer that split in two from the weight of grapes. When I bend down, as instructed, to pick up a gopher skull amid a huge pile of bones outside an owl house built to keep rodents away, those bones are real life. Real life, I quickly learn, is anything except what you would do in Napa.
Then, lo and behold, over in the September issue of Wine & Spirits magazine there is a one page article at the end of the magazine that discusses (and quite well, I might add—it’s a good little piece), vineyard management from the point of view of hawks and owls in order to successfully execute (bad pun, I know) vineyard pest management.
Maybe this is the wine industry version of Shark Week, the notoriously popular programming on the Discovery Channel in which blood thirty viewers get their annual allotment of shark bloodlust.
Who knew vineyard pest management was such a riveting topic … this is something I can get behind. Forget the warm, soft and fuzzy pr aspect of solar panels and buried dung in a horn ala biodynamics; give me some good, swooping, predatory hawk kills coupled with a great horned owls eating a deer. Who doesn’t like, according to the magazine in reference to the great horned owl, “the tiger of the night sky?”
The Wine & Spirits magazine piece says in part:
“Every raptor has its place and its prey,” Schuster explained. ‘Kestrels, sharp-shinned and Cooper’s hawks will go after smaller songbirds that larger raptors aren’t interested in. When a kestrel moves in, starlings vacate the area—it’s like a great white shark at the beach. Larger diurnal raptors (hawks and eagles) are mostly interested in squirrels, rabbits and rattlesnakes, but barn owls are selective feeders—they won’t anything they can’t swallow whole. They go after voles, rats and gophers and they’re seriously nocturnal—they hunt by hearing, not by sight. They can actually hear gophers scurrying under the ground, hover over the hole, and yank the rodent out.”
The above quote is from John Schuster, who runs Wild Wing Company in Sonoma. His company web site can be found here—incredibly interesting in its own right. And, a man after my own heart, a musician by passion, he has opened for Indiana native son, John Mellencamp.
As I think about the serendipitous nature of hawk references in popular media and sustainable viticulture, I’m struck that a wine related book that explores some of the grittier aspects of vineyard life might be ready for an eager public and secondarily, John Schuster might win my vote for “somebody I would most like to share a bottle of wine with who is not my wife.”
If I can’t have an in-person shark week narrative, at least give me somebody who says things like, “By combining owl boxes and raptor perches, you can have a 24-hour killing program.” It makes for good drinking conversation and is certainly the less sustainable side of sustainable viticulture. Bring on that hearty glass of red … wine.
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