October 3
There was a big weather change at the end of this week. We started out in the high 90’s with dry, sunny weather, but by Thursday it was overcast with a significant storm moving in Friday night. When the forecast is 100% chance of rain on Friday night, I guess it means it’s going to get wet. This was an improvement over last week’s long range projection which had the rain starting on Wednesday.
We finished harvesting for our Merlot program with three blocks of Cabernet Franc from our Soda Canyon vineyard. Each of these has a different French clone of the variety, so we are very excited to see the differences. We continued to press tanks as they went dry and encouraged our pressed tanks to finish the last stage of fermentation. The wines are dark and concentrated and indicate a great Merlot vintage.
At Twomey West, we finished the last Pinot Noir crushing on Friday, just in advance of the storm predicted to douse the north counties. We also pressed Pinot and some lots of Pinot were barreled down. Sound like a busy week? It was!
~Daniel Baron