What a vintage this has been! We finally began to harvest last week. After a rainy spring and one of the longest, coolest growing seasons in recent memory, our thermometers flirted with triple digit numbers for several days during the last week in August. Farther north in Sonoma Valley, temperatures soared as high as 110° F on Tuesday, the 24^th.

September brought a return to moderate weather, but some damage had been done. With foggy, damp mornings the norm throughout the summer, growers had opened their leaf canopies to facilitate air flow and sunlight penetration as a hedge against rot and mildew. But protection against one concern left them vulnerable to another. Grapes that had not been acclimated to warm weather were suddenly exposed to intense sun and heat that shocked and sunburned as much as 30 percent of the crop in the warmest areas.

While we sustained a little damage to a few clusters, fortunately we are in a cooler region. Perhaps more significantly, our vineyard rows run east-to-west, and we don’t remove leaves on the south side, so we were not as exposed as north/south rows that are open to the west. In Carneros, the wind also can create a canopy flop in north/south vineyards, resulting in even greater western exposure to intense afternoon sun.

Labor Day usually seems to bring some change, either a heat spike or rainfall. This year we expected some rain, but received just a slight sprinkle. We had a little heat the following week, but it was good in that it pushed things along a bit. The vines progressed slowly through a cool month until we had a little heat wave last weekend that we needed to get harvest going.

Our Russian River vineyard is late, and my little vineyard at my home was later than normal, but parts of the Donum Ranch typically take until late September into early October to ripen. We finally harvested my vineyard and the Calera Pinot Noir selection at Donum last week, and one block of our Donum Roederer selection was ready as well.

For the past ten days, our weather has been ideal, and that’s the forecast for the coming week, too. The fruit is sound, and these wonderful 70-degree days and cool nights will allow slow, deliberate picking after plenty of hang time. The skins should soften and dimple, developing beautiful tannins and total ripeness and yielding really lovely, intense wines.

So we anticipate ticking along nicely, jumping from block to block to pick at the most opportune moment. Not the most difficult of harvest scenarios by far, and we should wrap up the 2010 vintage by the third week of October.

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