2009 Harvest- The Fruit is Coming In

We harvested our first vineyard yesterday and sorted, destemmed and began cold soak on the fruit today. In another five days or so we will begin the fermentation. The first fruit into the winery this year was from Lone Oak Vineyard in Santa Lucia Highlands. Fruit was in great shape and chemistry numbers were right where we like them to be. I know we can make some fine wine with this good juice.

This year has been close to picture perfect. There were some concerns earlier about getting fruit to sufficient ripeness. There have been a few minor concerns about "hens and chicks" which are berries of varying size. I don't think either of these will present any problem for us. We had excellent even ripeness on our Lone Oak fruit and our two other Pinot vineyards- Split Rock in the Sonoma Coast and Doctor's Vineyard in the Santa Lucia Highlands are progressing very nicely. We will be picking both within a week to ten days.

Our Cabernet vineyard is in the cooler southern part of Napa Valley and we will be able to get a little more hang time on it- probably the pick date will be into October.

All in all, a great year and it is nice to breathe easier vs. the wild weather in '08. The '09 vintage has shaped up alot like '07- steady and slow with long periods of relatively cool weather and no heat or cold extremes. '07 was an easy and consistent year and it was not hard to make great wine. Anyone tasting the 07 wines is likely to agree with the consistently high wine quality across all of California and across many of the wine makers.

'09 may even be better than '07- there is every possiblity for this result.

Looking forward to making some amazing wines!

Cheers,

Dave