by Jeff Miller of Artisan Family of Wines (Seven Artisans, Sly Dog Cellars, Red Côte Rosé)
Harvest finally started for us yesterday when we brought in our Syrah. Picking started at 6:45 a.m., but we immediately ran into a problem. This year nature was not kind in giving us some major heat waves interspersed with an otherwise generally mild growing season. The effect was a huge amount of shrivel.
Our Syrah is laid out with rows running east-west, meaning we have a north and south side of the canopy. The north side did fine, since it avoided the harshest of the sun’s rays. The south side, however, suffered.
When we started picking, we got way too much of the shriveled fruit no matter how hard we tried to convince the pickers to avoid it. Though we stationed workers (including myself) at the macrobins where the fruit was deposited to go through the fruit and toss out the poorer quality, we couldn’t keep up with the task.
Desperate times call for desperate measures. After thinking things over, we decided that the amount of good fruit on the south side of the canopy being minimal, and the problem of avoiding the bad fruit insurmountable, we sacrificed the south side of the canopy altogether in the interests of maintaining quality. So our harvest was short, but at least the quality appeared to be very good.
It was all crushed by mid-afternoon. We’ll inoculate with yeast either Saturday or Monday. Between now and then we’ll do some lab analyses of the juice, and in all likelihood make some additions. We’ll probably bleed off some of the juice, which increases the ratio of skins to juice, which results in greater concentration in the finished wine.
More next week.
