On the Eve of Harvest 2014 – Notes

Of course we can’t have harvest until Jon Bonné of the San Francisco Chronicle announces it, and he has done just that this morning in his SF Gate Blog Posting. Yes, it looks to be an early harvest in much of California, at least for white wine grapes. David Everett harvested the Las Positas College Sauvignon Blanc grapes yesterday. Our Occasio Sauvignon Blanc, as of yesterday, is still probably a week to ten days away. Tomorrow we will do our first detailed base-line sampling of both Sauvignon Blanc and the Pinot Noir (used for our Rosé) and have a better picture of our timeline.

The goal of any harvest is to pick the fruit at the proper stage of ripeness for the style of wine. For example, we will harvest Pinot Noir long before it would be harvested for a red wine, because for a rosé style it is about acidity and freshness. For Sauvignon Blanc, it is about the balance between the grassiness, acidity, and fruit- and this will be affected by the vineyard site and, of course, the hand of the winemaker.

One of the interesting features about this year’s harvest is the high relative humidity we have had during fruit ripening. The average for Livermore Valley is 30% daytime, while the past few weeks we have hovered near 50%. This humidity is not high enough to put mildew pressure on the grapes, but is high enough to reduce water loss through the berry. Thus, we might see skin and seed ripening with lower sugars, since transpiration through the skin brings in sugar through the phloem. I am excited to see if this proves true.