Harvest is getting closer and things are really starting to shape up. Look at those beautiful 777 Pinot Noir clusters.

The dryer weather has really helped and the flavors and numbers are coming into line. Pommard Clone Pinot Noir on our winery site was at 22.5 brix Thursday with a pH of 3.35 and TA of 8.6. The flavors are there and we could definitely make solid wines right here. We will do a small test pick Monday with our daughter's 6th grade class. This should be a great experience for all. The harvest is the culmination of a year of farming work and I'm delighted they can participate.

Later in the week we will have some of our custom crush fruit coming in and the plan is to bring in all the rest of the Washington warm weather varietals Friday. Harvest will begin in earnest on our sites next Friday and run through the weekend and into the following week. We're hoping to pick up another 0.5-1 bric over the week and a small amount of acid conversion. Amazingly this could actually result in an outstanding vintage! Cross your fingers for us and enjoy the sunshine.

Come out and visit it us next weekend if you want to check in on the full blown harvest activities.

I wanted to put up a couple of pictures of our Pinot Blanc. You can see the spots of Botrytis on the clusters. My estimate is that 5-10% are currently affected with low to moderate severity. You can see it as a browning of the skins as they lose their integrity split and slip off easily. Also if you look carefully in the first picture you can see our cleanup crew, ants and wasps, hard at work. We do strive to maintain bio diversity in our LIVE certified sustainably farmed vineyards. Beneficial and predatory insects can help reduce the impact of vineyard pests and pathogens. We did manage to put on our OxiDate organic eriadicant today and will be working hard to keep this under control.

The Pinot Gris and Pinot Noir currently appear less affected. Grape vines have a complex systems of response to pathogen attack that include skin pigments and the antioxidant resveratrol, which help reduce their susceptibility to Botrytis; both are present in dark colored varietals.

On a positive note the overall weather picture seems to be improving with less rain and a number of sunny days in the mix. This last shot of fall sunshine will help us with skin pigment, tannin and flavor development.

We're starting to see some botrytis showing up in our Pinot Blanc. I'm not sure its all bad but we're going to try to keep it under control. Moderately botrytized Blanc can produce characteristic spice, but we have a ways to go before harvest so we can't let it go crazy yet.

Even the best vineyard practices can't keep the mold at bay in this rainy year. We are going to try an organic curative spray called OxiDate which is basically hydrogen peroxide. I've heard mixed reviews on the effectiveness of material and it is quite costly per acre so we'll be evaluating it pretty closely.

So far the other varietals seem to be fairing a little better. The flavors in the grapes are developing and the seeds are browning up. There is no doubt that we aren't going to see the sugars we'd like to this vintage if 23-24 brix are the optimum; most of the Willamette valley will be harvesting in 19-21 range this year. This doesn't mean we can't produce some great wines it just will take a lot more "wine-making" to do it. After all we saw some excellent wines in 2007 from a similarly cool wet harvest.

We're just hoping to hold on now till the sunny weather next week!

We had a few people out at the winery this weekend to help us with some of our first fruit. Merlot came in from Washington for our Soleggio Super Tuscan blend. We sorted just over 1.5 tons of fruit and ran it through the destemmer into a small fermenter. The first step on its way to a one week cold soak prior to fermentation. Chuck one of our assistant wine makers discussed the importance of cold soaks and punchdowns over a Sangiovese fermenter and then everyone had a turn with the punchdown tool.

This year we have had to make some major grape sourcing substitutions for our Washington veriatals. The vineyard where we have sourced our Cabernet and Merlot for many years, Pepper Bridge was devestated by an early freeze last November. This happend before the vines had become dormant and the vines where killed down to the ground. They will have no crop from Pepper Bridge in 2011; fortunately the vines in Walla Walla are own rooted as the phyloxera soil pest does not seem to thrive in their sandy soils. Because they are own rooted they will be able to grow new vines from the surviving root system.

What can I say its farming and is fraught with challenges. We are having our own challenging vintage in Oregon with cool weather and rain this year.

It was a very productive day in the vineyard and winery today.

We contined to cold soak our first fermenter of Sangiovese; picture at left. The cold soak extends the amount of time that juice is in contact with the skins helping to extract every bit of flavor and color into the wines. This is especially important with thin skinned varietals like Pinot Noir but helps to build bold deep flavors in all red wines.

We also kicked off the fermentation of our second frementer Sangiovese; with one of our favorite yeasts isolated by the Consorsio del Brunello in Siena. The perfect yeast for this VCR 6, Brunello clone Sangiovese. Yeast can have a huge impact on wine character and in this case it brings out the varietally typical flavors of berry and cherry with very full mouth feel.

At the end of our day our 4 bins of frozen viognier from Seven Hills vineyard came in and went straight into the press for our Dolce Vino Ice Wine you can see the white frost on the berries. The freezing concentrates all of the flavor and sugar and the juice we use to make this wine is typically at about 36 brix .

This is almost double the sugar level of most of our dry white wine musts.

Finally we received 4 bins of Merlot from Le Mirage vineyard in Washington. We will be processing this tomorrow morning with some help from the Harvest Trail participants. I’ll include some pictures of them sorting tomorrow; all in all a full day and good start to the vintage.

A little more rain in the vineyard today our total so far is about 0.5” over the past few days. It’s definitely shaping up to be a challenging Pinot Noir vintage. Fortunately we have pretty solid cover crop over about 90% of the vineyard and all of those plants will help sponge up a good portion of the water so it doesn’t all end up in the vines.

Look at those nice tight small Pinot clusters in the picture. We've been blessed at our site with consistently small clusters even in our Pommard clones. Our average cluster weight is around 115 grams this vintage. I have seen some massive clusters at many other vineyards with average weights of 200 grams or more. Pinot means small and since most of the flavor is in the skins you really want the smallest berries possible. This is especially important in thin skinned varietals like Pinot Noir. So I’m very happy to see we don’t have the monster clusters that are showing up elsewhere.

You can also see the bird netting we’ve put up on all of the Pinot so we won’t experience the heavy losses we had last year. We lost over $10,000 in fruit last year to the birds and that really helped justify the netting investment. It truly is the only effective means of controlling bird damage and I hope this investment pays off this year.

Harvest is going to be late this year and I don’t expect to start picking anything on our site before October the 20^th. The real challenge this year will be botrytis. Even the cleanest most meticulously managed fruit zone will develop mold with enough rain. So far we are looking good but I’ve been hearing about mold already showing in vineyards and with more than two weeks and a chunk of rain to go it is going to be dicey.

Not much news from the vineyard or winery today. I spent the day in Seattle meeting distributors hoping to find someone to take over representing our wines in Washington. After all even great wines do need someone to sell them. It was a productive day and I think we've found a great representative for us in A&B Imports. They were very excited about our wines quality and value.

Rain in the vineyard today; we're seeing some berries splitting out there. So far just a few and no botrytis yet. But I'm really still hoping for a couple of weeks of 75 degrees and sunny to get us a great vintage.

Merlot should be coming in on the weekend or early next week and we'll be kicking off our Sangiovese frementers Friday, and more pictures to come soon.