October at last
The rain that was promised, and normally delivered this time of year, has not materialized. Unless of course you count the barely perceptible drops that hardly kept the dust down. Just as predicted with the arrival of October, things have cooled considerably. Again the dry and cool weather are making for a very interesting harvest. Early on it looked as if everything would be picked within days but as things have slowed (ripening that is) the blocks have began to show their fierce independence and refused to cave to peer pressure.
Sugars are trending towards higher levels but my commitment to flavors has got me hanging fruit out longer than even I had expected. We have harvested about 20% of our fruit so far. Only one fermentation has taken off thus far so my impressions of the harvest are still buried in the haze filling my head, the result of a 23 hour work day followed by the usual 14 hour-a-day monotony. I suspect any day now I will wake up to either find that everything is in barrel or that it was all a dream and my fruit is still hanging on the vines.
Talk around the valley centers on high brix, botrytis, and desiccation. Though I have seen each of these none have been extreme or beyond our ability to deal with. I mentioned in earlier posts that this entire season has had me baffled, and though my confusion continues I am now just to the point of trusting the vineyard. Sometimes a wine grower just has to believe that the vines themselves want to make good wine and that they should be given the chance to do so.
[Your Name Here]
2 Comments
Reader Comments (2)
Are you having any night frosts, Jerry?
Arthur,
Sorry for the late response, actually making the wine always takes precedent over commenting on it.
Frost during the growing season is fairly rare here. This might seem contradictory given that Oregon is a "cool" climate in terms of viticulture.
Knowing that Oregon is "cool" has always made sight selection a priority in vineyard development. While our friends to the south tend to plant the convenient to farm, flat, valley floors we here in Oregon have known from the begining that doing so would be a disaster. So frost is something that we, ironicaly, avoided.