It has been hot here in Dry Creek Valley. Not just belly aching warm, but truly hot! 109 degrees this past Thursday. Yikes! The Pinot Blanc was already harvested (before this heat wave) with near perfect ripeness for Pinot Blanc. Yes! Even with the extreme heat, we’ve been cozy (55-60 degrees) at night giving both grapes and humans time to recover. That’s when our harvest team comes in and begins picking (~3am) under lights. This insures that the fruit we harvest is cool, crisp and concise. This preserves the subtleties of aroma and perfume that we love in our wines. It also allows our team to work in the coolness of early morning, which, if you’ve ever picked grapes, is very, very important. We like happy pickers to pick our happy grapes. Makes sense, right? The last benefit to the cool pre dawn harvest is that it keeps our electricity use down. If the grapes come in cool, we don’t have to try and cool them down. Nice.
Talking to industry people at the Dry Creek General Store, it’s not just us at Michel-Schlumberger that have been working hard to preserve fruit quality, it’s everyone in the valley that has spent the year trying to grow the best fruit possible. To all farmers, this is nothing new. Every single season there are challenges and this vintage is certainly no different. Monday’s harvest was Chardonnay, Pinot Noir and a touch of Zinfandel…and boy, oh boy, does it look good!
