Harvest Season
Easily the most exciting, and busiest, time of the year for wine production is harvest season. Once the fruit arrives at the winery, it is all systems go! Harvest season starts in mid-August and lasts through late November. During this time, our team begins the winemaking process, turning grapes into wine. It is a combination of nerves and optimism for what the vintage promises that drives the energy in the cellar for weeks of long days and nights. Long hours prove necessary as the separate lots of fruit work their way through fermentation, requiring constant monitoring but minimal intervention.
Wine style is directly linked to the timing of the harvest, which happens between August and November. Picking decisions are based on a wide range of parameters such as grape flavor development, skin softening and phenolic maturity, sugar accumulation, pH and TA balance, overall vine and grape cluster health, and upcoming weather conditions. It is by analyzing these conditions that we are able to determine the optimal picking date for each grape variety.
Hand Harvesting
Hand harvesting and careful delivery are critical components of making quality wines in a facility so far from the vineyard. Evaluation of ripeness in the vineyard is essential, as it determines the quality of the finished product in the bottle. We work very closely with our growers to determine the optimal time to hand harvest, ultimately deciding when each cluster is cut off the vine by hand and placed into a small picking lug. Once off the vine, the grapes are carefully shipped to the winery in refrigerated trucks where they show up in perfect condition.