A late, but possibly great, harvest is in the offing!
Plus, it's the last week for our advance wine sale. Please don't miss it.
Good things come to those who wait. - English proverb
But don’t wait too long. Our advance wine sale ends Thursday!
On September 1—five days from now—the prices on our 2021 Inaugural Vintage wines are going up. So is the shipping. If you haven’t yet placed your advance order, especially for our celebratory Eclipse Malbec (remember, the Great American Eclipse is April 8th!) please do so before Friday. As a loyal reader you’ve earned the discounted pricing and free shipping but as we prepare for our official release date, we need to get our pricing in line with the true value of the wine. We will be shipping out all orders, including all advance orders, around October 1 assuming the weather is cool enough by then for safe transport.
Go to www.tinyvineyards.com right now and lock down your allotment. All three wines are already tasting fantastic, and will be a wonderful addition to your holiday meals this fall and for your eclipse chasing this coming spring!
Is harvest late?
Normally, by this time of the year every red grape in the valley is exactly that, red . . . or purple, or crimson, or black blue. And every white wine grape has been harvested, or is just days away from being picked. But as you’ve undoubtedly heard, harvest in Norther California wine country is two to three weeks behind this year, and most of the grapes you see hanging in the thousands of acres of vineyards that make up the patchwork skin of our landscape are just now going through veraison—a French term that describes “a physiological stage of grape development where the berries stop accumulating mass and start accumulating sugar. More visibly, red grapes start their color change from green, while white grapes take on more of a yellow tint.”
I borrowed this description from the Tablas Creek Blog, unequivocally the best writing on viticulture and wine making there is on the Internet. Check them out and be sure and scroll down through two or three of their latest postings about Harvest 2023. Bottom line: Yes, harvest is going to be late this year—due to our long, cool, wet spring and, so far, pretty moderate summer—but it’s not necessarily bad news. Despite some whacky viticulture happenings, like shatter, millerandage (also known as hens and chicks), and oddly enough, sunburn, there’s an upside for the quality of wine to expect if not the quantity. I’ll let the scribes at Tablas Creek describe these conditions simply because they’ve already done it far better than I ever could.
So, let’s talk about “hang time.” Not that bitchin’ gnarly maneuver you do on a surf board, but rather the extended time that a long, slow growing season—like the one we’re currently enjoying—allows grapes to slowly ripen on the vine. The longer hang time they get the greater the complexity of flavors that develop.
And so, we’re fine tuning that right now with controlled irrigation, continued cane tucking and hedging, and aggressive leaf thinning to expose clusters to sunlight, heat and air. As long as the weather doesn’t have a hiccup, or wildfire breaks out, or the rains come early—all admittedly more likely to happen than not—then we could have a harvest like the days of old, picking in the halcyon days of October when our grapes naturally reach true physiological ripeness and oenological promise.
Every year I find two or three bird nests amongst the vines. Usually, it’s during harvest when I’m reaching well within a large vine looking for grape clusters. By that time of year, the nests are almost always deserted, although I will occasionally spook a mama bird off her eggs earlier in the summer when I’m tucking canes. But this year, just this past week actually, I found this marvelous redwing blackbird nest with what could only be an optimistic second or even third clutch of eggs for the season. The discovery was so life-affirming and positive it made me embarrassingly giddy. A harbinger of what is yet to come in bounty from the vineyard.