Harvest in full swing

What an amazing harvest!  Harvest is moving very quickly now as the heat and climate have been perfect.  An outstanding year.  We have already harvested the Chardonnay, Merlot, and one Cabernet Sauvignon block.  We should have all the fruit in by weeks’ end.  To give you a flavor of the effort, here are two pictures of the activity.  First we pick the grapes all NIGHT long.  Harvest is much better at NIGHT since the fruit stays cool and stable until we get it in the tanks. Bet you never knew how important the NIGHT was to making great wine.  The second is a view of the sorting table before the wine heads into the optical sorter, through the crusher, and into the tank

The optical sorter is so cool.  Millions of berries fly down a conveyor belt and are viewed with an electric eye.  If one of the many berries is just slightly imperfect, a small air jet flicks the berry off the conveyor before it can drop into the crusher and into the fermentation tank.  Amazing technology.  We can’t wait to taste the result.