This is going to be interesting…
… to say the least. I’m certainly not trying to put a happy spin on it, nor am I gloom-n-dooming it - just trying to tell it like it is. We’re looking at what could possibly be one of our latest harvests ever this year, due to the non-stop cold and rain that dominated May & June. Spring, what spring? The cold and rain also contributed to a very uneven fruit-set around the valley, and so we have virtually no crop at some sites and an abundance of too-large clusters at others. Other than that, everything is normal!
And of course the vineyard that always yields our best fruit and makes our best wine is the one with hardly any fruit this year. The gods are cruel, at times. (Of course I’ll be singing their praises if they give us a great, sunny & dry September and October in the fall - which it appears we will need every single day of). Our old vines in the Dundee Hills up at Maresh Vineyard tried their best, but about half of the potential clusters aborted and bore no fruit (caused by the extended cool streak prior to flowering). Every vine is so different there this year that it’s impossible to estimate what we’ve got - we just need to hope that whatever it is we do have is damned good!
Maresh Block 10 - nice leaves, no fruit
The healthiest and most robust vineyard so far this year is our new Azana vineyard, where of course we were not planning to harvest any fruit this year, being only the third leaf there. We won’t take our first fruit from Azana until 2011, but at least it is looking balanced and healthy at this point.
Ribbon Ridge Vineyard actually has a fairly normal looking crop hanging now - I’m guesstimating 1.75-2.0 tons per acre from a quick eyeballing this morning, but we’ll be able to get a more accurate estimate in the last week of August (at which point we’ll still have some 50 days to go before harvest. Yikes!)
Ribbon Ridge Vineyard
And for the first time, this year we’ll be working with some fruit from Nysa Vineyard in the Dundee Hills. Nysa is directly adjacent to my old stomping grounds at Domaine Drouhin Oregon, and has also set a pretty solid crop-load in 2010. We’ll be doing a thinning pass later this week, bringing it down to a potential 2-2.25 tons per acre, and then we’ll see how it’s looking around veraison late in the summer. If we need to we can drop a bit more then.
Fruit-set at Nysa Vyd. in the Dundee Hills
We typically say that the quality of the vintage in Oregon is all about September. This year it will be all about October too - as we’ll need at least 2-3 weeks of warm & dry October weather to get this crop ripe before the proverbial merde hits the fan. Daunting, disheartening, discouraging, depressing - ahh, the multi-colored joys of growing grapes and making wine!
August 24th, 2010 at 6:14 am
[...] Oregon Wine Press about how the vintage is shaping up entitled “All Eyes on the Sun“. Scott Paul posts frequent updates on his blog, including a recent post taking a look at each of the vineyards [...]