The 2011 harvest has officially begun at Apolloni Vineyards! Laura and I had a great trip out east to collect the first of our warm weather varietals. It must not only be the grape harvest we saw truck after truck of onions and apples.
First stop Seven Hills vineyard in Walla Walla. We picked up our golden colored Viogner for our Dolce Vino ice wine. The grapes were beautiful with the flavor of honey. The Viognier came in heavier than we expected and we ended up with 6 bins; we were only expecting 3 or 4. I wouldn't be able to haul all of these and our Sangiovese from Ciel de Cheval. Panicked calls were made to anyone in Oregon we know who might be getting grapes today but no luck on sharing trucking. So we had to make an emergency detour to the fruit freezer in Richland. We left four of our six bins there to be frozen. We'll pick them up next week when our Merlot is ready and they should be perfect for our ice wine pressing after the 4 hour drive back.
Then we headed up towards Red Mountain. We made a quick stop along the way to drop bins and check in on the Sangiovese at Candy Mountain just south of Red Mountain. Laura did the sampling and was wondering where the mountain of candy was. I told her the grapes are as sweet as candy and she agreed. The sangio was at 22 brix so it'll be another 10-14 days before we pick.
We finally made it up to Ciel at 4pm to pickup our VCR 6 Brunello clone Sangiovese. It was still busy at there as they were furiously picking to get ahead of next week's rains. We left Red Mountain with 9 bins of beautiful small berry Sangiovese. The grapes reminded me of 2009; another vintage which generated low yields and small berries. That vintage made some of the most structured deeply flavored Sangiovese I've ever seen. I can't wait to see what these wines yield.
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