Middle of the 4th inning, the tarp is off the field and the teams are warming up.  What am I talking about?  Just a poor baseball analogy for this year’s harvest.  We’ve been waiting a bit here for the weather to clear-and it has-and we are now ready to get back into the swing of this harvest.

     What is still out there?  We still have our Pinot Gris lot to bring in as well as four Pinot Noir lots.  It’s almost all Pommard-the oldest clones and blocks we have.  I’m kinda excited to see what we’ll get.  If there was ever a year for these older vines to shine, this would be it: plenty of hang time, plenty of vigor still left in the vines and crop levels that they should be able to handle.  I look forward to getting them to a fermentor.

     Speaking of fermentors, the first four lots of Pinot Noir have all started their fermentations.  For those of you wine geeks out there, here are some of the key stats: 

Lot     Brix     pH

115     24.9    3.61

114    23.7    3.72

667    23.4   3.66

777   23.5   3.67

     These are great numbers-but wine is more than numbers, it’s flavor and color-and those also are looking good!  The caps that have formed on the fermentors are nice and black and the color of the juice is coming along nicely.  You never really know what you’ll get for a wine’s flavor and color until many months down the road-but so far I’m very happy with these!