We picked our Swan Pinot Noir selection on Wednesday, and we completed harvesting all of the Pinot Noir on The Donum Estate on Friday. It seemed like good timing because cloud cover moved in followed by a few showers on Saturday morning.

It’s been an odd, fascinating vintage. We have lovely, fully ripe flavors without a hint of greenness, but we still don’t have high Brix numbers (roughly, percentage of sugar content in grape juice) despite considerable hang time. We speculated that perhaps the early September heat somehow damaged the rachises (main stem or framework of the grape cluster) so that they couldn’t conduct carbohydrates efficiently, thus stalling sugar accumulation. But when we cut into them, they were still functioning.

From September 7th until now, we have enjoyed moderate weather with maximum temperatures in the mid-70s to low-80s and the average temperature in the cool high-50s. So even with all this hang time, lower sugars may mean relatively low alcohols in the wines.

The Russian River Valley fruit that we brought in the second week of September has been in the tanks for three weeks now. The Dijon 667 is simply gorgeous, what little there is of it.

For the second year in a row, we have experienced light yields and a very orderly harvest that has allowed us to devote a great deal of attention to detail. This year the issue of light crop is not cluster count but cluster weight. We’re down about 40% from “normal” yields.

There is talk of the economy everywhere. From our grape growing and winemaking perspective, despite the light crop, we had to stick with our philosophy, opening canopies and thinning crop to achieve the utmost quality. These practices are very hand labor intensive, and that translates as expensive, which raises our fruit costs and reduces our margins.

At the same time, the weak dollar drives up the cost of barrels. But the real question for our industry is the economy. What will happen to our friends in the restaurant business? At least we have excellent quality if not quantity, and it may be fortunate for our industry that two short vintages will not mean a glut of wine as we all face an uncertain future.

We’ll control what we can. All of our Pinot Noir is in and we’ll take advantage of more nice weather and pick our Chardonnay blocks sometime next week.

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