AVV: September 2007 Archives
There is one thing we hope for during the harvest every year. Good timing.
Like the rain, for instance. It's great to have several good rainfalls during the winter to load up the water table before the buds open so that the vines have something to work with over the course of the growing season, which customarily tends to be very dry.
It's a different matter still to get a big storm in late September or October.
Rain is the winemaker's nemesis during harvest. It can cause grapes to mildew. And water-logged grapes tend to make lousy wine.
Despite the forecasts, the rains have stayed away this week. That's allowed us to get in all of the grapes that are most susceptible to damage. Thin-skinned varieties like Zinfandel can really take a beating in a storm. But all the Zinfandel is picked from our vineyards in the Alexander and Dry Creek Valleys so we've dodged that bullet.
In fact, we're about 60 percent through harvest at this point. All that remains are the Bordeaux varietals--Cabernet Sauvignon, Merlot, Petit Verdot, Cabernet Franc--as well as some Syrah. We're less concerned about rain with those varietals due to their thicker skins. But even those grapes couldn't withstand a couple of downpours. The Cabernet that came in this week is of very high quality, though the yields are down substantially. More on that later.
You can almost see the skid marks on the roads around the Alexander Valley now that nature has slammed the brakes on the harvest. The temperatures have plummeted over the last few days as have the sugar levels in the grapes.
A week or so ago, we took a Brix reading of 23 from the Cabernet Sauvignon on one block. This week, that number fell to 19. So after scrambling since the end of August, we've won a bit of a reprieve.
We used to grow small quantities around the winery, enough to produce a few hundred cases of a varietal wine with a bit left over to blend into wines like the Cab and CYRUS. But there's been a lot of interest in different varietals over the past few years so we've planted some new Cab Franc which should begin producing good quantities of fruit over the next couple of years.
Smack in the middle of all these Bordeaux varietals is the Gewurztraminer. It always comes at an inopportune time, usually when we are coping with a convoy of Cab or Merlot trucks. We pressed the first Gewurz on Wednesday and more came in yesterday and today.
About the only thing that helps is that the Gewurz is first in and last out. Because our growers up north in Mendocino like to pick the grape at night to preserve the freshness of the delicate grapes, we press the Gewurz very early in the morning or very late at night. Over the next few months, harvest will be a 24 hour a day undertaking.
So the heat wave continues. I keep hoping for a break so we can catch our breath, but so far no luck. Our vineyard manager Mark Houser has the picking crews working fast and furiously to get the grapes picked before the sugar levels get out of control. He's been starting the crews well before dawn and they usually quit around 10 a.m. Mark calls it a big chess game which is what it really feels like.
Yesterday, Mark and I checked the Primitivo, which the crews picked fairly quickly. It's only about an acre block, but the vineyard is on a steep hillside way above the winery and the vineyard has to be hand-picked. The fruit looked very good which means we are likely to handle it as a separate varietal, probably for one of the Alexander School Top of the Crop wines, as we did with the 2005 Primitivo.
Despite the warm weather, I'm still very encouraged that this is going to be a great vintage. This has really been a textbook growing season with temperatures pretty moderate all summer. We're getting this heat now, but we had such good flavor development in the fruit before so I'm not too concerned about what the weather is throwing at us.
