I'm going to break tradition and do my summary before we're done picking. We have just 3 moderate sized Pinot lots that will come off Tuesday-Thursday and we'll be done.
Total is going to be around 630 tons in 68 lots, split between 17 clients. We sold more fruit for sparkling this year which made the first part of the harvest a bit more hectic than previous years.
Plenty of winter rains this year with full ponds and great moisture for the vines. No frost again (our average is 7-8 nights) which saved lots of water and sleep. Budbreak seemed about 10-14 days later than normal and bloom was tracking about the same. Historic pre-bloom rains (about 5" for us) hit our area this season. We were unable to get tractors in the field for at least 10 days which put a huge hiccup into our mildew program. The other thing that was just as concerning was having so much available moisture for the vines at this point of bloom. We were feeling on the lucky side as we were only about 5% bloom.
We held our breath and got back to business, expecting some amount of shatter (and fungal issues) from the rains. It didn't happen. The vines grew strong and well for weeks. After the rain we experienced some of the most perfect weather in years. Warm but not too hot and mild nights. We were still expecting a later than normal harvest but when fruit started to color we realized the efficient canopy and perfect conditions moved the vines ahead. They made up ground like I've never seen.
We had a young field ready for sparkling on 8/22 but that's not fair to consider the beginning of harvest as young vines are normally early. We started picking our mature sparkling fields on 8/27 which is just about our normal time. Without any real weather issues we were able to keep up the pace. This is the first year in 10 that we never had to pick on a Sunday. We really didn't have a day that we didn't have enough people. We altered our start time from 5:30 am to 5:00 am and its working. We had a few easy days that we even started at 6:00 because we didn't have that much to pick.
I don't see how this won't be a killer wine quality year. The fruit just seemed that good.
We left very little fruit hanging after it was all said a done. The current state of the market is a topic for another time. We did great and that's all I can control.


Edited by Casey Hartlip (10-09-2019 17:00:43)
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"Behind every bottle of wine there's someone driving a tractor"