Wrapping it Up
As our Assistant Winemaker Doug Vuylsteke aptly said, "This harvest was fast, furious, and just like last year!"
Harvest 2007 is all over but the shouting, and we are pretty pleased with the results. Harvest began on September 20th and we hustled (nearly every member of our staff helped out) to get 85% of our fruit in before September 29th and the impending rain. Although we would have liked the fruit to hang a little bit longer to develop more fully, every block had near perfect acidity, pH levels, and sugars. As Doug said, "the numbers were right on" and as Scott Nagle, Brand Ambassador commented, "These grapes taste great and make me smile."
We still have a little bit of Riesling on the vine, fruit that we are letting the sugar levels rise in so we can use it in our 2007 White Riesling Dessert Wine (made in the style of an ice wine). Other than that, we're moving on to the final parts of vineyard maintenence for the year, namely watching our organic grass cover crop spring up and spreading compost.
The compost that is destined for our Walnut and Peachtree Blocks is made up of grape pumace (from Harvest 2006), organic straw and cow manure. Now that it's had a year to enrich, we'll spread it in the vineyard to raise the hummus content in the soil and make it healthier for forthcoming years. Congrats to everyone on the Harvest team for another successful Harvest!