Daily Decisions

A Harvest Diary

Tuesday October 1st and with the coast heating up it’s time to head back down to Santa Barbara wine country and check in on the vineyards down there. After a quick swing by the winery to check in on the Zin ferments which are just fine. The heat that began yesterday is predicted to persist for a week - an unusually long hot spell for this area where the typical heat event is 3-4 days. The question we need to answer for ourselves is whether or not to pull the trigger on harvesting any of these blocks or rather to let them weather out the heat and pick after. This decision is based on both flavor development in the berries and our assessment of how well the vines can stand up to the heat stress. Flavors and other markers of ripeness are not there for the reds we decide. The prime markers for me are seed color, adherence of the pulp to the seed, perceived sweetness of the skin and color release from the skins in reds. Senescence of basal leaves is a solid indicator as well. The two Chardonnay vineyards on the other hand have turned a corner and we put them on the schedule to pick for Thursday. With Chardonnay there are fewer clear indicators of ripeness. Once the basic sugar quantity has been achieved I simply wait for the disappearance of underripe character and then pull the trigger. I don’t find that there’s any advantage to letting Chardonnay hang on the vine past basic early ripeness - and there're plenty of downsides especially the degradation of the wine’s ageabilty. One non plant based indicator of fruit ripeness that’s always been a sign for me is when the honey bees begin to show interest in the fruit. We saw this in one of the Chardonnay vineyards today further confirming what our tasting was telling us - this fruit is ready!

Wednesday October 2nd and the heat is building. Paso Robles just north of us is breaking heat records for this late in the year. This is a warm inland area prone to heat even before global warming began having strong discernable effects in the late 80’s. It’s only gotten worse in the decades since. It’s depressing to think about how little has been done to prevent this catastrophe. Later generations I fear will curse us for our glib inattention.