Daily Decisions

A Harvest Diary

Unusually for harvest time there wasn’t any winemaking or vineyard decisions that needed to be made over this weekend of September 21-22nd. The two Pinot fermenters are very close to dry and just need to be left alone at this point. Sometimes the best thing you can do is to do nothing. I remember my first vintage, 1979. There were only two of us, Mike Richmond and I to do all of the work. It was frantic and the days were long. Things eventually slowed down in November, but I was so used to working intensely all day I kept asking Mike, “What do we do now?”. Finally he explained to me that you have to leave the wines in peace for some periods, and that you can overwork them or wear them out if you keep messing with them. He called this approach benign neglect. It’s a bit like raising a child. Mostly you want to leave them be. You have to take care of them, but you don’t want to smother them with your attentions.

Monday September 23rd and back at it with a vengeance. The Paso Zin came in this morning. This is a westside hilltop vineyard on calcareous soil. We made Mourvedre from the same vineyard last year and it was stellar. We’re pretty excited about the possibilities of these grapes. It’s been many decades since I’ve had the opportunity to work with Zin. I love drinking it so I’m happy to be able to play with it once again. Like most Zin it sort of looked like shit in the bins. There was the usual combination of perfectly ripe, underripe, overripe and raisined clusters. Some of Zin’s complexity certainly comes from this wide range of ripeness which is characteristic. We decided to add some SO2 along with the Egide (non-saccharomyces yeast). The SO2 will hold down any bacterial passengers on the grapes and the Egide should swamp out any yeast that’s there. This will give us a few days of soaking up so we can determine the true sugar levels in this ferment. This is always a challenge with Zin because of the ever-present raisined berries which will leak a lot of sugar into the must. And they do that slowly so you need an even longer pre-fermentation soak to get an accurate determination of the true weight of the must.