Harvest Update from the Winemaker

Happy Wednesday,

We are at the tail end of what has been our second heat event this growing season. The weather has bumped sugars up a bit and quickened the ripening process. Many of the skins still have a chalky grittiness to them but I’ve noticed that the green flavors have disappeared from all of the different blocks that we bring in for Round Pond wine. Now is the time of year when I am in the vineyard everyday checking to make sure all of the fruit remains sound as well as tasting for flavor development which will trigger my decision to pick.

Today we harvested our first lots of Nebbiolo and Cabernet Sauvignon. The Nebbiolo got hit pretty hard by the first heat event earlier in the season and as such we lost a significant portion of the crop. The fruit that made it to the winery this morning does look good and although we will have a smaller volume of wine I think that what we do make will be pretty tasty.

The crew is performing a selective pick in the Cabernet block this morning. I’m having the guys harvest only part of the fruit off of each vine. Their instructions are to pick any clusters with dimpling berries or any signs of sunburn. What they are leaving behind are visually perfect clusters. I am doing this because the clusters that are starting to dimple are finished ripening and will only dehydrate from this point forward so they are as good as they will ever get. If I let them dry on the vine any longer then we will have “pruney” flavored wine which I find unappealing. The fruit that I left on the vine will have longer to ripen and the vine now has fewer clusters, so more of the vine’s energy will be focused on those clusters that are still hanging. I’m hoping that the longer hang time will translate into some Reserve quality wine.


Cheers,

Brian Brown
Winemaker

Slowly but Surely... Harvest!

The thing so many people forget about the wine industry is that it is an agricultural industry. This means that first and foremost, it is a farming based business. So by nature of the business, this means we live and die by what the year's harvest brings us. This year has been a particularly challenging growing season. We had a cooler than average summer which makes it very difficult for the grapes to fully ripen on the vine. Throughout the growing season, the viticulture team went through the vineyards to perform "leaf pulling". This means they pulled leaves off the vines to make sure the fruit was as exposed to the sun as possible to achieve ripeness. Then in the late summer, we experienced a freak heat wave that was so hot, it burned a lot of the exposed fruit. Normally that fruit would be shaded and protected from the sun's harsh rays, but not this year. The heat spike only lasted 2 days, but the result was sunburned fruit.
This is not the end of hope however, it just means a lot more work for vineyard crew. When it came time to pick Sauvignon Blanc a couple weeks ago (21 days later than past years) the crew had to first make a pass through the vineyard and remove all the sunburned/shriveled grapes. They then went back through to pick the rest of the clusters that were ripe, and if there were a few sunburned grapes left on the cluster, the picking crews removed those grapes carefully before throwing them in the picking bins.
This is a textbook case of what we call "precision farming"; it can be very time consuming and expensive, but the results are worth all of the extra effort.
So as of now, we have harvested most of our Sauvignon Blanc, and a little Petit Verdot. We are still waiting on our Cabernet Sauvignon to get fully ripened, and these warm Indian Summer days are definitely helping things along. Stay tuned for more harvest updates and see more pictures on our facebook page!