What’s in store for our 2025 wines? It’s early days, but we are hoping for a great vintage.

In the video below, Owner/Winemaker Adam Campbell gives us an update on Vintage 2025 on September 12th, right at the beginning of harvest. Themes for the year are an early harvest, small clusters and berries and fewer seeds in Pinot noir specifically.

TRANSCRIPT:

ANNA: How’s harvest going so far?

ADAM: Vintage 2025 is looking great. We’re super excited about the quality on the vine, and we’re ready to really get rolling next week.

ANNA: What can you tell me about the fruit for 2025?

ADAM: Well, I think because of our spring weather, we had a really nice fruit set with a lot of small clusters, small berries, which I always think is amazing. Crop was a decent crop. We did some thinning to get the levels down to where we know they need to be for quality. But yeah, overall I’m just really loving the look of the grapes this year.

ANNA: Nice. And who’s on our team this year?

ADAM: We’ve got a really great team, of course. We have our permanent crew that is amazing. And, in addition to that, we have some of our guys and gals that work in the vineyard that are gonna come in for some sorting and punch downs for the morning. And then we’ve got a pretty international crew of interns, two folks from Germany, a fellow from Brazil, and then we have three folks from the local area that are also helping.

ANNA: Mm-hmm. And is there anything different about this year? I think we’re always looking for what makes this vintage different from other years… Anything you can anticipate?

ADAM: Well, it’s an earlier harvest. Here we are almost mid-September and we’re about ready to get started. Some years that wouldn’t happen till early October, but we know the weather’s gonna be really nice. I love that it’s super cool at night. Already we’re down into the fifties, low fifties, which really kind of brings the grapes a lot of freshness. We’ve done some early picks where we’re starting at 6:00 AM and finishing up by 9:00 AM to get the grapes in the winery for processing. With it being an earlier year and potentially not having as much pressure with the weather coming in, it’ll really allow us to pick the grapes a little more slowly. And what that allows us to do as winemakers is to be really thoughtful about exactly what tank each grape is gonna go into. And we could really put our mental energy into each and every fermentor. So, we’re not gonna be running around like a chicken with a head cut off. We’re gonna be able to really be thoughtful about each fermentor this year.

ANNA: Was the rest of the year early?

ADAM: Yeah, so we started with the earlier spring and then we just had really, really lovely summer weather, not super hot through June and July. We had very rarely any days, even over 85. August ended up kind of heating up and we got some warm weather, which we’re used to. But I think that because we started off the year with reasonable temperatures, canopies look really good. There’s plenty of water holding capacity even though these are dry farmed vineyards, they need to bring a lot of healthy energy from that early season so they can carry through all the way to the end. The other thing I really love about the 2025 vintage, I mentioned earlier about preferring small clusters and small berries – one of the things about Pinot noir, which is somewhat unique to the variety, is that the seeds of Pinot noir have an incredible amount of tannin and bitterness. And so everything we do when it comes to making our Pinot noirs is about protecting those seeds that are there, and what I really am liking about this vintage is that because we have those small berries, each berry has a smaller number of seeds. So within a grape plant, any individual berry could either have one seed or four seeds. So what we’re seeing this year is most grapes have one to two seeds. So we know that in the fermentor there’s just going to be a smaller percentage of those little seeds that can add a lot of bitterness to the wine. We get plenty of tannin and color and, and really all the good stuff from the skins of the grape. If anything, we want to protect those seeds so they don’t give us those bitter flavors that can make a wine kind of out of balance.

ANNA: That’s very cool. I didn’t know that we’d end up with fewer seeds if we had smaller berries.

ADAM: Yeah, and, you know, if you have a grape with one to two seeds on average compared to some vintages where we have three to four seeds, that’s half as many seeds in each individual fermentor. So the potential for adding that bitterness to the wine is so much less in a great vintage, like 2025.

ANNA: Cool. So when will you actually judge the vintage in terms of the quality of the wines and what we ended up making this year?

ADAM: So we start getting clues all through the season. I’d say I’m 15 to 20% there knowing that this is gonna be a great year, but it really does kind of come down to the finish line, what our final weather will be for each individual vineyard. And then what we do, because each fermentor is different, it’s its own little body of life. We keep everything separate and we really can’t make pronouncements till we see these Pinot noirs go from fermentor tank to nice french oak barrels and then go through that malolactic fermentation to give you the final view on it. So I’d say check back in the spring.

ANNA: Awesome. Well, cheers to great vintage 2025!

ADAM: Yep. Looking forward to it!