I drove up to
Coeur de Terre Vineyard yesterday thinking that I was going to be helping out with harvest. Turned out I was a week too early--maybe two weeks. This is wrapping up to be a strange vintage. We started with an unusually hot spring, followed by over a hundred days of summer without any measurable precipitation. Harvest was scheduled to begin early, and then, a dying typhoon came to town, and all bets are off.
I was talking to Shane, the assistant wine maker at
Coeur de Terre. He said the grapes had enough sugars a week ago, but that they still tasted a bit green. Wine makers have different ways of measuring the maturity of their fruit. One is a simple calculation of sugars (measured in something called brix). Once you hit, say, 22 brix, you harvest. The other test is to taste the fruit. You can have the right amount of sugar and still not have ripe fruit. Scott Neal, the owner of Coeur de Terre decided to wait. It's a gamble.
You can see the rivulets of water coming off the slope of the new vineyard sight at Coeur de Terre in the photo above. I remember last year when I was up at the vineyard after harvest and noticed the deep, dry, cracked ruts running along the vineyard. Scott at one point wondered if perhaps his water well might have been getting low. He won't need to worry about that this year.
I love this time of year, even with the rain. It's the season when I set aside a few days to get up to the vineyard and just look around. It is so beautiful, and I wonder why I don't do it more often. I also love the rain. I missed it when I lived in central Montana. I can't imagine living in a place where it doesn't rain a great deal. Water brings life, it is life, and I'm glad we have it in abundance. The heat and dryness of last summer scared me a little bit. Is that the future of the Willamette Valley, dry summers with high heat? I hope not. Probably this year is more like it. More temperature extremes, larger more powerful storms, with longer and longer stretches of hot spring and summer temperatures. I think Scott is going to be glad he waited to harvest, but I wouldn't want to be in his shoes. I've just never enjoyed gambling that much.
