One of my goals as a winemaker after each crush is to get the winery buttoned up before Thanksgiving. The wines should be fully topped in barrel and prepped to go through malolactic fermentation (secondary bacterial fermentation converting malic acid, found in apples, to the softer lactic acid, found in milk). The winery should be in a winter “safety zone” so that I’m comfortable leaving for vacation.

During harvest, everything stacks up. Business and personal bills go unpaid and there are piles of unopened mail. But by Thanksgiving, there is time to re-cap the vintage and evaluate aspects of it while they are still fresh in my mind. I think about changes we can make, equipment we should purchase.

I try not to taste the wine until it completes malolactic. Sometimes I do, but less and less. It’s not good, because the wines are typically in an awkward state with high acids, and they can be awkward now and show beautifully later. So what’s the point?

This is a time to reflect, to catch up and plan. It takes until January to get back in the groove. There are definitely post-harvest blues. You are so pumped up for weeks on end, making all these decisions on the run. Everything is thrown at you and you just deal with it.

Suddenly it all stops cold. You go from what has to be done to what needs to be done. And there’s an emotional and intellectual transition. You’re not used to any free time, so you don’t quite know what to do. You have been so focused that you sort of lose contact with the rest of the world.

Most years, you are in crisis mode. This year was a luxury, not nearly as bad. We had ample time and true fruit maturity. That allowed me to capitalize on available tank space for longer macerations (steeping juice or wine with skins for greater extraction of color, flavors) and more cap (layer of skins that float to the top of the tank) manipulation, perhaps four punchdowns rather than three. We had the time to do it and the fruit called for it.

We put in ten- to 12-hour days, not 14 or 16. We had more time to dot each “i” and cross every “t.” In some vintages, you leave something hanging because you’re just too tired to handle it. This year everything was done every day.

We’re scheduled to bottle the 2006 Donum Pinot in February. It’s sitting topped in barrel now. I need to re-evaluate that wine. If it’s ready to bottle, I need to move it from barrel into tank and hold for bottling. In December, it would be nice to do some comparative tastings before gearing up for next year.

Looking back, 2007 in Carneros and Russian River Valley was pretty ideal. The only bad thing is that there wasn’t more of it. Yields were light, but we had perfect weather and great fruit, and the Pinots are stunning. Everything was aligned to give us tremendous flavors, lower alcohols and great acids.

I make a small amount of wine from Oregon, where 2007 was a nail-biting vintage. It was a bad weather harvest. I brought two lots in early to avoid rain and left one lot out on the vine through three inches of rain. I was skeptical, but they all came out really solid. In 2006, Oregon wines were lush, juicy and really flashy. This year will be a classic from good producers, with good tannins, structure and fruit, wines with depth but not flashy.

In California, the 2007 Russian River Pinots will be very pretty, hedonistic and fruit forward, and Carneros Pinots will be very complex and concentrated.

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