Harvest Begins . . .

Harvest began on Saturday with 2 tons of petite sirah, and continued on Sunday with a small lot of carmenere. Fruit from our source vineyards all seems to be getting ripe at once. Dan’s cellphone is buzzing constantly, and we have fruit scheduled for delivery every day this week. Sundays are usually quiet in the tasting room as far as customer traffic, but it was a busy day for grower visits as local growers stopped by with baggies and buckets of field-selected clusters for us to test, and updates on ripening and picking crew schedules. I put some syrah clusters on a pretty plate on the tasting bar so customers could taste the berries and evaluate grapes the way we do—for soft skins, acid balance, and toasty pips. I also did some quick refractometer readings right at the tasting bar for the growers, and let our customers use the refract as well. We’re also in the middle of packing and shipping our fall wine club packages, so it’s really hectic around here. But the air is alive with expectation, the annual surge of excitement that accompanies the beginning of harvest.

A long, wet spring caused a lot of "shatter" in the clusters during bloom, resulting in many small unfertilized berries that remain tiny and green. In addition, a cool summer with a few extreme heat spikes has not lent itself to even ripening. Extreme heat does not ripen fruit--when the temperature exceeds about 88 degrees, vines shut down; resulting in berries that lose moisture content (thereby falsely increasing sugar readings), but without proper vine metabolism, the fruit is not really ripening.

However, after the unfortunate El Nino and La Nina vintages, most growers here have become extremely proactive. Growers dropped fruit in early summer to prevent the spread of mildew and provide more wind space between clusters, and growers have been dropping fruit again in late summer to ensure that the remaining crop load will ripen in the case of a cool autumn. Nona Vineyard spent $7,000 on 16 acres just dropping part of their crop on the ground. Grenache from Alto Pomar will come in at 50% of normal due to spring thinning. The remaining fruit will be very high quality, but there will be very little of it, here at least! If October is steady and warm, Dan may decide to bring in some later lots.

In the meantime, Dan is trying to convince me that we—just he and I—should pick our first harvest of syrah together. "Honey," I said. "We picked our first harvest of head-trained zinfandel together, under a full harvest moon, and it was very romantic, but it was also back-breaking work. I said Never Again!"

"I know," he replied. "But that was the zinfandel."