A little more rain in the vineyard today our total so far is about 0.5” over the past few days. It’s definitely shaping up to be a challenging Pinot Noir vintage. Fortunately we have pretty solid cover crop over about 90% of the vineyard and all of those plants will help sponge up a good portion of the water so it doesn’t all end up in the vines.

Look at those nice tight small Pinot clusters in the picture. We've been blessed at our site with consistently small clusters even in our Pommard clones. Our average cluster weight is around 115 grams this vintage. I have seen some massive clusters at many other vineyards with average weights of 200 grams or more. Pinot means small and since most of the flavor is in the skins you really want the smallest berries possible. This is especially important in thin skinned varietals like Pinot Noir. So I’m very happy to see we don’t have the monster clusters that are showing up elsewhere.

You can also see the bird netting we’ve put up on all of the Pinot so we won’t experience the heavy losses we had last year. We lost over $10,000 in fruit last year to the birds and that really helped justify the netting investment. It truly is the only effective means of controlling bird damage and I hope this investment pays off this year.

Harvest is going to be late this year and I don’t expect to start picking anything on our site before October the 20^th. The real challenge this year will be botrytis. Even the cleanest most meticulously managed fruit zone will develop mold with enough rain. So far we are looking good but I’ve been hearing about mold already showing in vineyards and with more than two weeks and a chunk of rain to go it is going to be dicey.