As we cruise into the first full week in October the days of full ripening sunlight are getting short. In general you have good ripening weather till mid October when the combination of shorter days with lower angle weaker sunlight and colder nights tends to end the productive life of the leaves.
We got a little bit of rain Saturday morning just before dawn. It barely got the ground wet and didn’t do any harm to the vines. I had a friend who taught me a lot of my basic winemaking and he never panicked. When it would rain or threaten rain he’d say, "It always rains during harvest." That’s true but some types of rain can be catastrophic. Luckily this wasn’t one of them.
We picked our "minor whites" a few days ago. By minor I mean in quantity not quality. We brought in the Pinot Gris, the Sauvignon Blanc and the Viognier all on the same day. By juice flavor both the Viognier and the Sauvignon blanc look like they’ll be tremendous wines. Crops were very light we only got a couple hundred cases of each. The Pinot Gris did a bit better. We’ll have about 300 cases of that.
The very last Pinot from block 597, my favorite on the ranch was scheduled to be picked today, but we’ve pushed it off till the day after tomorrow. This is the block that we’ve made the "Beyond" bottling from the last two vintages, and it’s one of the few blocks of Pinot where we use whole cluster fermentation. I’m saving some extra delicious barrels for these final two fermenters. It’s likely to be one of our very best wines.
-Larry Brooks, Winemaker
