Harvest 2022

Holy cow this year’s harvest is just next level. Climate change is wreaking havoc across the board and has for years but this year is just insane.  Normally it takes two months for us to pick all seven varietals from our vineyard.  This year every grape will be off in 12 days…yes, less than TWO weeks! Which means we will be inundated with fermentation bins, lack of sleep, consistent questions of why we chose the path to wine, and generally a failure to remember to get some food in our stomachs with all this chaos.

The positive is that we will have a longer period of time to rest and relax…as long as we get all our fruit through fermentations properly. That also raises another point, the yields during 2021 were super low.  Just 60% of what we expect.  We were hopeful that the 2022 would make up for that shortage.  Alas, it looks like we’ll come in somewhere between 40-50% of what we should get.  So while the picks are fast and furious, the amount of grapes is WAAAAAAYYYYYY lower than we would hope.

So what does that mean? Well, we’re excited that we prepared a bit for this as a “just in case” situation and contracted to bring in some outside grapes from an amazing farmer/winery near us.  But even then we’ll be quite below our expected volume.  The “glass half full” view is that the low yield means even more concentrate juice from our estate. So we can’t wait to see how the wine turns out (we said the same last year and geez the 2021 wine tastes fantastic in barrel!) but it also means significantly less wine available for our guests.

Once we get through this year’s harvest, we’ll take a hard look at how much wine we actually have available for our wine club first and then for our guests that come visit.  It looks like we’ll have to close off new club members come next year so if you have friends interested in enjoying our wine, tell them to join asap!

Tales from an exhausted winemaker – Kory