The Sun is Teasing Us

It's teasing us.

You can almost see it: the sun! After these days of gray skies and rain, we can feel it coming.

Yes, the weather report is for glorious sunshine, 80+ temperatures and dry breezes over the next ten days. This should be enough to get our grapes where they need to be.

Although spraying for botrytis would be the easy solution, Scott has decided to not spray, "Would you want that in the wine you're drinking?" he noted. I could not agree more. As the vintage has given us plenty of fruit, it would be much better to throw away some bunches that get infected with botrytis rather than douse the entire crop with things we don't want in the wine. That's what low impact agriculture is all about.

This is the great advantage of Scott's long experience here in the Willamette Valley, you can depend he won't overreact to the whims of nature. His knowledge allows us to reach for our goal of producing terroir driven wines not overwhelmed by over manipulation in the vineyard or winery - a goal Scott and I completely share, but something difficult to accomplish without his level of experience.

I just returned from a walk through the vineyards and the bunches look beautiful with little botrytis to be found. Scott has the crew out removing any unripe or imperfect bunches so the soon to arrive sunshine, that is only teasing us now, has only the finest bunches left to ripen.

Crush is finally really about to arrive - and it looks like it will be a sunny one!