Here’s your Harvest 2017 update:
October 1st:
This year our winemaking interns hail from around the US – Florida, Pennsylvania, Utah, California and Oregon, with a single international student from Italy. Their experience varies, between them they have an average of two harvest seasons under their belts working in New Zealand, France, Pennsylvania and Oregon. This year we have our interns housed on two vineyard sites: Mount Richmond and Goodrich. We are enjoying 12 hour work days, hearty lunches made by Pat Campbell and daily riddles – if anyone has any good ones send them along!
Also on our crew, Elk Cove’s Shirley Brooks, VP of Sales and Marketing. Shirley is taking a “break” from the world of selling wine and managing our sales and marketing team to punch down, sort, rack and clean.
October 23rd:
We’ve brought in 90%+ of our fruit so far with some record-breaking days. Wednesday October 9th was our biggest day ever, with 110 tons landing on the crush-pad in one day. That’s enough fruit to produce 6,600 cases cases of wine. At 800 grapes/bottle, that means over 63 million grapes!
November 2nd:
November is upon us & we finally are getting a chance to catch our breath. All fruit is now in the cellar with red ferments bubbling away in open tanks and white ferments undergoing slow cold fermentation in closed tanks.
This harvest has been a classic Oregon vintage with plenty of sunny days and refreshingly cool nights only interrupted by rain a few times in late September and mid-October.
With over 40 vintages under our belt and amazing hillside vineyards we were able to pick the right harvesting windows and pick beautifully ripe fruit. Even at this very early stage we are seeing ripe tannins, fully developed flavors & classic cool climate freshness in all the wines. As always it is really too early to make any pronouncements on the vintage so stay tuned!
