I’m long overdue for a blog posting. Normally we pick in a week to ten days and our harvest is over. This vintage will be drawn out for over a month, a long time for a small Pinot Noir specialist. The biggest topic has been botrytis, but there’s a lot of misinformation about it. The botrytis was already there – it was not caused by the rain in early October. It had been there and just grew more.

The rain actually refreshed the vines, and we didn’t see any big drops in sugars. Sugar levels have just risen by very small increments this year due to the long, cool season. We had a wet spring, but we didn’t see much early botrytis. The shoots were clean, growth was good, and bloom and set was wonderful. With ample water in the ground and a good set, we saw more and bigger seeds than normal, which made the berries bigger. Our cluster count wasn’t high, but cluster weight was. Normally they weigh 100 to 110 grams, but we saw clusters as big as 200 grams at Nugent Vineyard, although with some dehydration they got a little lighter.

Often when you have big berries, you have big spaces between them, but not so this year. We had big, tight clusters. And that’s important.

A friend of mine recommended a “harvest tart” that she learned to make in Florence. You put wine grapes, no sugar, on a thin crust and just bake it. The seeds become totally dry and create a pleasant crunchiness. You top it with whipped cream and it’s delicious. I tried it with my daughter, Hannah, this year. We plucked each and every berry from the cluster – something we don’t do when sampling. Hannah even counted the berries, an average of 140 per cluster.

What we found was that the second, inside layer of berries was very tight, and some berries had been squeezed until they popped, creating a potential site for infection. That’s the key to botrytis this year. We were caught a little off guard because the big, tight clusters had rot inside that worked its way out.

What could we have done? We can’t open up clusters like we do the canopy. We didn’t irrigate and pump up the berries. So we are left with thinning and careful sorting as and after we pick. That’s how we’ll get the quality we seek.

The wines in the cellar reassure us. We had outstanding flavors early on, then they diminished and then, suddenly, the light goes back on. It’s like stop and go traffic, frustrating, without a smooth energy and flow to the vintage. But looking on the bright side, we’ve been able to concentrate on each block and we haven’t had to rush or panic or give any load preferential treatment logistically.

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