Harvesting Time!

What a great harvesting season! We’ve been busy picking, pressing and churning our grapes into juice. This year’s harvesting season kicked off extremely late, about 28 days later than average. In the wine industry, late is a good thing. A late harvest means that we have a surplus of extra juicy grapes, so more wine for everyone!

We’re able to harvest late this year because the temperatures have been so mild lately. We had an incredibly temperate summer—not too hot, not too cool. We also had a nice mix of rain intervals to keep the vines hydrated and happy, unlike the drought we experienced last year. Although, last year’s drought allowed us to harvest early giving us highly concentrated grapes for amazing quality wine, but a smaller yield.

It’s been quite some time since I’ve seen such a late harvest. I’m especially excited about our Vidal Blanc. The fruit looks incredible and the vineyard smells likes pineapples and tropical fruit. We’re expecting a surplus of Vidal Blanc grapes, so hopefully we’ll have some ice wine to harvest in the coming weeks… more on that later.

This year, we’ll harvest 630,000 pounds of grapes to produce 22,000 cases of wine compared to last year’s 10,000 cases of wine. Cheers to the 2013 harvest!