One of the best parts of working in wine on the Central Coast is that you get to spend a lot of time outdoors in some of the most beautiful scenery anywhere around. This morning was no different; I got out the door just as the sun was threatening to come up over the ridge, picked up a thermos of coffee, and was climbing around in a hilltop vineyard in the mountains just west of Templeton by the time that the sun popped up out of the fog blanketing the valley floor.
I was pulling some cluster samples from the Russell vineyard, which is on the Russell family's estate in the west hills of Templeton / Paso Robles. They are selling us a small amount of fruit from this vineyard, and from what I understand, my friend Russell From is getting fruit from here as well, for his Herman Story wines, and Loring Wine Company is in one of these blocks too, so I have some really good company. The site looks down the hill at the L'Aventure winery, which turns out some of my favorite wines in the region (everyone knows them for their pricey, highly rated estate red wines, which are fantastic, but I love their dry rose too, and for about $16 I can afford to drink a lot more of it!)
The top photo tells the story of Cabernet Sauvignon in the Paso Robles AVA this vintage. Not much of it mostly - poor weather when the vines were blooming essentially made for really loose clusters, with very few berries - as you can see, it looks like 80% of the cluster is just plain missing, and that is pretty accurate in a lot of cases. This phenomenon was really tied to bloom date, so it can be really isolated by age of vine, health of the vine, cordon height, elevation, exposure to sunlight, cold air drainage off hillsides, inversion layers, and basically anything else that can influence the timing of the vine. For this reason, it has been really difficult to get solid estimates of crop loads this year, and the vines seem to be ripening at really different rates; vines with little fruit may be a week or more ahead of their more loaded down neighbors.
My guess is that we will be down regionally about 30% or more compared to an 'average' harvest year in many of the Bordeaux varieties, particularly Cab Sauvignon. Ouch! But will the wines be really, really good to make up for the short crop? I think that in some cases they will be. We are having really good ripening weather currently, with cold nights and warm days, and everything seems to be inching its way toward ripeness at a pace that we can keep up with and make good picking decisions. The strategy that I plan to follow with such an uneven crop is to err on the side of picking a bit ripe; it doesn't take much unripe fruit to really make hard, thin wines out of what could otherwise be generous and full. I will try to keep water to the vines, so that the clusters that are ripe will not raisin while the rest of the crop is just getting their flavors in line.
It will be interesting to see this year's result!
Click this link for more harvest photos
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