Les Blog

Just got off the phone with our Eastern Washington grower, who reported that the vines there and pretty much everywhere else are behind schedule, perhaps as much as a week to ten days. That would start our Washington harvest in October for the first time I can remember.

He says things are looking good, though, and to be sure, Washington has a wider picking window that the Willamette Valley, which is also behind. There’s a danger things may get so late we’ll slide into frost territory, but he’s confident the upper Yakima valley will get a few more degree days between now and then to ripen things up.

What the vintage won’t be is heavy, jammy, and Parker-friendly, I’ll bet. And that suits us just fine. In fact, I mentioned to the grower — who made wine in Southern France’s Côtes du Rhône for nearly a decade — that the cooler season would probably produce a truly French and correspondingly stellar Cabernet Franc, aromatic, floral, and effortless. He agreed.

The Willamette Valley may not get off so lightly, however. If Nazi scientists were to design a perfect set of circumstances to fester powdery mildew around here, this year would be it. Luckily, our Red Hills fruit is tended by pros, so while for many this may indeed be a vintage made on the sorting table, we’re feeling good we may not need one — and net some delicate, authentically Pinot fruit in the bargain.

Six grapes, seven wines, five separate crushes. But as frost begins to lick the vineyards of Eastern Washington and rain soaks the Willamette Valley early next week, it feels great that after tomorrow morning, we’ll have all our fruit safely in fermenter.

Gods yadda yadda 100 point wine yadda yadda. What can I say? I’m a sucker for life-size concrete replicas. And so is our fruit.

Field samples from our Cab block show brix at 25.8, but pH at 3.4. That pH is down in Pinot country, and at .73, the TA (titratable acidity, a number loosely but not directly related to pH) is also high. So for Cab to have those numbers, something isn’t quite ready yet. The fruit may have enough sugar (that brix is more or less perfect), but the acid’s too high, so the fruit isn’t in balance.

I asked the vineyard manager to taste the fruit for us, and he reported back today that indeed, the Cab isn’t ready yet: seeds are still green, and the jelly-like sac around the seeds is still expansive. So he guesses as much as 2 weeks, though hopefully closer to one.

That’ll undoubtedly put our brix in the stratosphere, but as long as pH continues to rise, we can always add a little water to bring the sugar back into balance once we pick.

So hold on: this one may be a cliffhanger!

It’s official: we’re road-tripping to Yakima (or thereabouts) on Friday to haul back a combined ton of merlot and syrah. Both are in the 25-26 brix range; with luck, they won’t get much higher than that before we can rescue them, but the vineyard manager says they’re both tasting perfect.

It’s the first crush of the season, so there will probably be a lot of head scratching as we try to remember what it was that worked so well last year. But with luck, it’s like riding a sticky, sugary bicycle, and it’ll come back to us once the fragrance of fruit fills the air.

On the way to a wedding over Labor Day weekend, I set up appointments with the two Eastern Washington vineyards we’ll be working with this year: Elephant Mountain Vineyards and Coyote Canyon Vineyards. It was a long, long day of driving, but it was great to get a picture in my head of what the vineyards look like, and to walk the rows with the owners before the chaos of harvest.
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I pity the plastic surgeons and investment bankers who shell out for top-of-the-line equipment, build gravity flow wineries into the side of pristine hills, and lure the freshest UC Davis grads, all in frantic pursuit of 100-point wines. The real answer requires but a tank of gas: Simply sacrifice a little [ insert grape here - in this case, cabernet ] on the altar of Stonehenge, and your Parker score will improve by at least 3 points.

It’s worked for us every time.