A version of this article appeared previously in the San Jose Mercury News:

It’s the thick of harvest, and Santa Cruz Mountains viticulturist Prudy Foxx is making last-minute adjustments to her schedule. We were supposed to meet at Lester Family Vineyards in Corralitos, then head to another vineyard to check sugar levels in the grapes. Change of plans: It’s Day 3 of a mid-September heat wave, and Foxx has determined that a client’s chardonnay vineyard needs to be picked NOW.

When she arrives at Chestnut Hill Vineyard in the Summit area, followed by some workers, five-gallon buckets are distributed, and everyone gets to work. Then Foxx gets on the phone to plan another harvest. “It’s hard to put the jigsaw puzzle together,” she says.

Such is the life of a vineyard consultant during harvest. But this year is more hectic than usual. With several days of 90- to 100-degree heat, grape sugars are spiking and everything needs to be harvested at the same time. The 2015 crop is small, largely because of poor weather conditions when the vines “set” their crop, but the logistics of a fast-and-furious harvest are nevertheless daunting.

Foxx is considered the pre-eminent vineyard consultant in the Santa Cruz Mountains. She has clients throughout the roughly 50-mile-long appellation, although much of her work is centered on the Corralitos area.
But ask Foxx how many clients she has, and she’s likely to deflect the question. That’s because her services range from the occasional consultation to situations where she does pretty much everything, from setting up the vineyard to bringing in crews to do the work (she works with a labor contractor) to negotiating grape contracts. She says she has 15-20 people she considers “core clients,” with a total of about 125 acres of vineyard.

Foxx’s involvement with grapes doesn’t end with the harvest. She likes to check in with the wineries through the rest of the process. “It’s really important to me to follow up,” she says. She tastes the wines and talks to the winemakers to find out if they’ve had any problems. For example, a stuck fermentation – in which a wine stops fermenting before it’s dry – could be a vineyard problem rather than a winemaking one. So our next stop is Bargetto Vineyards in Soquel, to check on pinot noir grapes brought in a couple of days earlier from a client’s vineyard. Later in the day, we visit Alfaro Vineyards to taste just-pressed pinot noir from Lester Family Vineyards, Foxx’s first client when she started her own business in 1997.

“My really close clients are the clients who let me follow the wine through to the bottle,” she says.

Foxx graduated from Western Washington University and took a job at a winery near Bellingham. She noticed that a lot of the fruit coming in from eastern Washington was diseased. “I was enamored of the idea that wine was made in the vineyard,” Foxx says, but she realized that some farmers weren’t giving their vineyards sufficient attention. That’s why she doesn’t like the idea of “farming” a vineyard, because she thinks it connotes “forcing your will on it.” She prefers to talk about “growing” a vineyard.

Foxx’s experience in Washington prompted her to pursue a career in viticulture, so she moved to Santa Cruz to help manage vineyards for Randall Grahm at Bonny Doon Vineyard. After working for the University of California-Davis Agricultural Extension, then for the Santa Cruz County Agricultural Commissioner’s office, she founded Foxx Viticulture.

In addition to bigger clients, Foxx helps people plant residential vineyards. “I also generally try to talk people out of it,” she says with a laugh. She wants them to understand why they want a vineyard and for them to “have a relationship with their vineyard.” She’s not interested in working with owners who don’t want any involvement.

Foxx has a home office, of course, and a desk at Lester Family Vineyards. But her Honda CRV is her office during harvest. There’s a refractometer on her center console for measuring grape sugar, and she’s constantly fielding calls on her cell phone, sometimes in remote places with spotty service.

The next day will bring more calls for harvest crews and more visits to wineries. “This year, everybody’s just running,” she says.