Wow - we’re halfway through harvesting our grapes this year.  It’s been a very interesting year so far, and this year’s harvest may well prove to be the best we’ve ever had.

We started with Siegerrebe on Sept 14, which is always great because it’s a fairly small portion of our vineyard, and allows us to test out all our equipment and make sure it’s working properly.

Then last week (Sept 21 & 23) we picked Ortega and Agria, which was a couple of long days - Ortega is the slowest grape to pick, the clusters tend to wind themselves around everything in sight, canes, wires, other clusters of grapes, and makes it quite a challenge to extract the grapes from the vine.

Then on Sunday (Sept 27) we picked our Bacchus and Gewurtztraminer.  Normally we might have waited a little longer, but we’re picking it specifically for producing sparkling wine (again!) so we want it a little less ripe than if we were making a table wine.

Our Pinot Gris and Pinot Noir are left, and should be ready sometime in the next week or two.  Normally they are 5 or 6 weeks behind Siegerrebe, but this year will likely just be 4 weeks later.  Our early varieties were around normal timing, but our late varieties benefited from the warm weather in April and have caught up to the early varieties.

Hopefully we can get them all picked before we get any more rain.  Looking forward to a couple more weeks of good weather to finish ripening our crop.

Mark

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