Things have settled into a smooth enough groove now to talk about the early part of this harvest. It started off with a bang. That's for sure. Six of the eight days beginning August 27th were unseasonably hot with a few of them record breakers. This pushed all of the Pinot to high sugars as well as quite a few of the Chardonnay blocks. We began getting the Pinots off on Sept. 2nd when we saw that the sugars were not going back down again and the dehydration of the berries was in danger of pushing them towards raisins. There is always a nerve racking period between when the fruit comes in and when you taste the first new wine. This is because the decision to harvest and the choice of fermentation technique is irreversible, yet you don't know if your choices were correct until you can taste the first wine 8-10 days later. Until you get your first completed fermentation you don't really know for sure if the decisions you've made are correct. This year was doubly unnerving because such a high percentage of the fruit had to come in very quickly. In a normal vintage the earliest picks will be small and a week to two ahead of the main picking so you get a little preview as it were. This vintage was more of an all or nothing situation. Last night and this morning we drained the new wine off the earliest picks and it is with some relief that I found the wines to be dark, flavorful and well extracted with tannin. It was not what I expected from this vintage, but I am happy at the result.
More than half of the Chardonnay has come in as well. It has been pressed settled and moved to respective barrels and tanks for its fermentation. It's very hard to tell much about Chardonnay quality at this early point. You can tell if it's bad, which this year is not. But, you can't really tell how good it is until sometime much later. January- February at the earliest and sometimes not until you've got it bottled. Chardonnay is far more coy than red wine, which reveals itself much earlier for better or worse.
Cheers and we'll be in touch through the next stages of Harvest 2009...
-Larry Brooks
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