First fruit

Freshly picked Pinot Noir vines at Armstrong Vineyard on Ribbon Ridge

Harvest 2015 began on Saturday morning, September 5, at our site on Ribbon Ridge, Armstrong Vineyard, with cool and dry weather more typical of late September when I'd normally expect to start picking grapes.

This cool end of season weather was key to the wine quality this year. Had we seen normal early September weather, in the 80s up to the '90s, things could have been grim. Grapes racing to ripeness, dehydrating and losing elegance and grace.

Instead, we had perfect picking conditions and fruit got to the winery nice and cold, something I never expected with a year this early.

Please tell me that's all there is!! ;-)

This year I upped production from Armstrong, but I definitely had to take a deep breath seeing 20 quarter ton bins of fruit loaded on the trailer. Five tons of fruit day one? That's almost more than I made in the entire vintage of 2010, admittedly only my second year when I worked with just two vineyards. Still.

Whole cluster Pinot Noir from Armstrong Vineyard

With more fruit this year, I experimented with a heavy proportion of whole clusters in one fermenter. That means sorting the fruit as usual, but bypassing the destemmer to allow the intact grape clusters into the fermenter. I typically destem the grapes, but I like the effect stems can have on wine texturally and aromatically. We'll see how this one turns out.

Happy guy in the driver's seat on the fork lift, for hours

Harvest day 1 turned out to be a pretty typical "fruit" day. Get up early, get out to the vineyard to oversee the pick, then get to the winery to get ready to process fruit before the grower trucks it over. Then hours of processing the fruit, with me on the fork lift driving as carefully as possible in some tight winery spaces. Then cleaning up, almost endlessly, and taking initial numbers of sugar, acid and temperature for each new fermenter.

This day we filled 5 fermenters, and once things were all done, around 10pm, I turned the lights off, locked the doors, drove home and thought about doing it all over again tomorrow with the first pick at Crowley Station.

A bit of interplanted Chardonnay in with the Crowley Station Vineyard Pinot Noir

So day 2 of harvest, down to Crowley Station early in the morning, loading a rental truck and driving the fruit myself up to the winery. This first pick at Crowley Station was the west block, a mix of clones plus a little Chardonnay that we co-fermented with the Pinot just for fun. Really just about 1% of the fruit was Chard, we'll see if we can pick out any uniqueness it may have added.

The rest of Crowley Station we held off picking for another week and a half. So this was a light fruit day, just 1.5 tons, but as you go through harvest you have the newest fruit to deal with but also all the prior fruit in various stages of fermentation. It starts to add up quickly.

Meanwhile there was planning for day 3, which would bring the first white grapes, Chardonnay from Methven in the Amity Hills. More on that and the rest of harvest next time...