What’s in store for our 2026 wines? Signs point to a classic Oregon vintage with plenty of hang time.
In the video below, Owner/Winemaker Adam Campbell gives us an update on Vintage 2026 on October 6th, when about 80% of the fruit is in. This year is characterized by a long hang time, giving the clusters plenty of time on the vine for complex flavor development.
TRANSCRIPT:
ANNA: Tell me, how is the harvest so far in 2026?
ADAM: Yeah, so far 2026 is turning out really great. We’re super excited. We’re getting some great weather. We had cool and kind of wetter weather in early to mid-September, which really extended the season. Here we are in early October, bringing in super beautiful Pinot Noir and Pinot Blanc today, and yeah, looking forward to great things.
ANNA: Nice. And how does this vintage compare to recent vintages?
ADAM: I think some other really nice vintages, like 2024, that was another year when we thought we were going to be picking really early, but we ended up getting cool weather in September, and we really value that hang time and additional concentration and complexity you get from more time on the vine.
ANNA: Yeah. So tell me why the obsession over hang time? I hear that a lot when we get these rains late season.
ADAM: Sugar ripening and flavor ripening don’t always align, and especially if you have a really hot summer or you’re growing grapes in a really warm climate, you can see sugars elevate before the flavors kind of catch up. And what we really want is for that balance where you get the right amount of sugar that will then ferment into the right amount of alcohol, but with the full flavor development, especially for red wines in the skin, where we get all the aromatics, the color, a lot of the complexity and flavor of a red wine comes from the skins. So we need nice ripe skins, a reasonable amount of sugar in the grapes, and we’re certainly getting that in 2026.
ANNA: Nice. How’s the fruit holding up?
ADAM:Really good. It’s interesting. We’re having warm weather during the day. This is unseasonably warm, early October. It’s going to be 80 degrees today. But what’s interesting is that I got here really early this morning, and it was 45 degrees. So we’re getting really cool nights, especially up here at this high elevation. That retains acidity. We get full flavor, but also nice, bright acidity. That’s when you make great wine.
ANNA: How is our harvest crew this year?
ADAM: Oh, we have a really great crew. We have the folks that help us every year, that the rest of the year are in the vineyard doing all the great work out there, pruning, thinning, shoot positioning, and then a number of them come in, and they’re just so well-trained, and they know what to do. And we augment that with, I think we have six people this year that have done harvests overseas. We have one gal from France. A lot of them have worked in New Zealand or Australia, picked up skills, so they come here kind of knowing a bit about what they’re doing, and then we can train them on the El Cove way to do things.
ANNA: That’s great. That’s awesome that we have some experienced winemaking students in the cellar this year. So Adam, it’s early October. Where are we at in terms of bringing all the fruit in and finishing up our fermentations?
ADAM: Yeah, it’s interesting. We’re probably about 80% in the door at the moment. Super happy with what’s come in, but we also have some really nice things left out there. Some of the top blocks at Mount Richmond that are going to come in this week. We have one of our offsite vineyards, Woodville, which is always an amazing old vine vineyard. That’s going to be coming in, I think, on Friday. We’re expecting that we’ll probably have everything off in the next five to six days. So far, so good.
ANNA: Nice. Can you just share a little bit with us how we decide what to pick when?
ADAM: When it comes to picking, I spend a lot of time in the early mornings looking at the vineyards with Travis, vineyard manager. We’ve worked together for 20 plus years, so we really know these sites intimately. Early on in the piece, you really need to work on timing and what you’re going to pick first and what you’re going to pick next. And then towards the end, we just kind of have an intuitive knowledge about what’s ripe, what’s ready. We’ll all go out there in the morning and taste the grapes and kind of look at the health of the canopy, how much dehydration we’re getting in the grapes. If we’re approaching a big rain period, we might have to go out and pick things a little faster. But I think having an institutional knowledge of the vineyards we work with really helps in terms of the winemaking.
ANNA: Nice. Is there any chance we’re going to get a forklift going behind you? Yeah? Okay. You think so? That’d be cool…
