Blogs

The harvest and harvest party are over.  I guess it’s time to be looking forward to my 45th year of growing grapes in Santa Barbara County.  It seems like just yesterday that this adventure began.  I can’t let this past harvest go unnoticed, for it’s now three years in a row that we’ve had ideal growing conditions.

About four days of harvest to go!  We have about 100 tons to pick, mostly Cabernet, Nebbiolo, Petit Verdot, and our small lot of Freisa.  This will be one of the earliest harvests I have experienced in the last 44 years for a variety of reasons, none of which are bad.  Our Harvest Party is planned to be right after harvest but this year, it will be four weeks later, which is also ok.  We have a great deal of time to get things ready for all of you attending.  

Seems like we always talk about the weather.  It is definitely a major factor in farming.  This may become the earliest harvest in my 44 years in Santa Barbara County.  The drought is only partly responsible.  We are already finishing spraying and will irrigate more  but bird netting is already taking place.  We have a good chance of picking grapes mid-August instead of the usual mid-September.  So things like our late August bottling schedule will now become part of harvest.  Megan and the winery have their hands full between trying to get one harvest in the bottle and the next harvest back into the tanks.  

As always, I blame Mother Nature!  A very short winter followed by a warm spring puts us about three weeks ahead of schedule.  Most of the varieties look very good.  Unusual heat hurt the fruit set in some of our Sangiovese and Syrah, but overall I am very pleased at this point.  Harvest in 80 days.