Paso Robles is Absurdly Beautiful Right Now

Last week, we got four more inches of rain over three days, bringing our January total to 8.66 inches and our winter total to 14 inches.  We're slightly ahead of where we'd expect to be at this time of year, and what's better, it's come in surges, with sunny interludes in between that allow the ground to dry out a bit and the cover crop to grow. The net result is a landscape that is as far away from summer's stark golden brown as it's possible to imagine:

I've been sharing these photos bit by bit over our Instagram, Facebook, and Twitter accounts, and they've been racking up some of the highest numbers of likes I can remember, so they seem to have touched a chord, particularly with the northeastern two-thirds of the country seeing polar weather right now.

I thought it would be nice to collect some of my favorites in one place. In no particular order, starting with a look down over the low-lying area we call Nipple Flat, showing both the undulating lines of the winter vineyard and the fog that's been settling in our valleys each night:

The moisture in the air that transforms the winter landscape can be hard to imagine if you've only visited in summer, but as I've written before, our winter climate is as much rain forest as our summer is desert:

The battle waged daily between the fog lifting off the saturated ground and the sun rising makes for a landscape that changes by the minute each morning:

That rising sun makes for some great drama in photographs, like this one of one of our 39 owl boxes, most occupied now with nesting barn owls:

By the time most of our visitors arrive, that fog has largely burned off, and the dramatic green of the grass and blue of the sky are the lasting impressions: 

We know that summer is the typical season when most guests visit Paso Robles Wine Country. But winter is my favorite season here. I hope that I've done it justice.

The Greening of the Vineyard

At this time of year, the landscape in Paso Robles changes fast. Within a few days of the season's first rain, you start to see hints of green under the dry grasses from the year before. The day after your first hard freeze, the grapevines lose most of their leaves as they pass into their winter dormancy. And suddenly, instead of the autumn landscape we had less than a month back, it's starting to look like winter:

The vineyard's annual change to winter colors doesn't always happen evenly. There are still vineyard blocks (mostly at the tops of our hills) that haven't seen a hard freeze, and which combine autumn foliage with a green undercoat:

For whatever reason, Syrah seems to hang onto its leaves (and their pretty fall colors) longer than any other grape. Witness this panoramic, with bare Mourvedre vines on the left of one of our vineyard roads and Syrah on the right:

The growth of the cover crop means that we've been able to reintroduce our animal herd into the vineyard. The areas they've grazed look brown, but remember that the manure they leave behind will just accelerate the growth of more cover crop later in the season. Our goal is to get the flock through every block twice between now and bud-break in April:

We are thrilled with the early rain we've seen so far this winter. We saw our first significant storm the week before Thanksgiving, in which we picked up a little less than an inch of rain. This was followed by a more significant storm the next week, which dropped 3.12 inches over two days. That wasn't all. The next week (which brings us to last week) saw another small storm drop a half-inch, and we have another storm forecast for this coming Monday. Overall, we're at 4.85" for the winter so far, and ahead of our long-term average. Even better, it has come with sunny breaks in between, which gives the cover crop a chance to get established and reduces the threat of erosion.

I'll leave you with one more photo, maybe my favorite that I took this morning. I love the feel and look of the air in a Paso Robles winter, with moisture differentiating receding mountains and softening the sun's intensity. If you haven't visited wine country in wintertime, you're missing out.

November: The Calm Before the Storms (Hopefully)

This November has been beautiful so far.  Days have remained warm and sunny, mostly in the upper 70s or lower 80s. Nights have been chilly, down into the upper 30s and lower 40s.  The vines have erupted into a riot of autumn foliage:

We're enjoying this weather in part because we know it could end at any time. Typically, we get our first real rain in the second half of November. That puts an end to the fall colors, and begins our transition into winter green. And we'd be thrilled whenever it starts to rain. But instead we're getting weather that feels more like October than November, except with longer, chillier nights. We're using the time in a couple of ways. First, we're carving furrows into the rows, breaking up the soil so that it's more able to accept that rain when it does arrive:

Second, we're seeding the vineyard with our custom cover crop blend, a mix of vetch, peas, beans, radish, cabbage, and rye. We'll be putting over 1000 pounds of seed out in the next week or two:

Third, we've been taking advantage of the warm afternoons to bring some barrels outside and encourage them to ferment a little faster. With the nights so cold, the cellar isn't getting above 60 degrees, so a little time in the sun can give the yeasts just enough of a nudge to get them finished: 

November also marks the flock's reintroduction into the vineyard. To better protect against mountain lions, we've added a pair of Spanish Mastiffs to the flock. They're only a year old and still growing, but they've already bonded with the sheep. You can see Bjorn, the smaller of the pair, in the foreground of this shot, looking proprietary:

The sheep have been enjoying the second-crop clusters that we left on the vines because they didn't achieve ripeness. For whatever reason, Tannat had more than its normal share this year. Although it looks perfectly ripe, even now, a month after we've finished harvesting the block, its sugars are still sitting around 15 brix. Plenty sweet enough to make good eating, but not to make great wine. So, it will make a snacking sheep happy instead:

The long-term forecast doesn't suggest any rain in the next ten days or so, although it seems like we might see our first frost of the year by this weekend or early next week. That it can frost at night and then climb into the upper 70s the following day is still amazing to me; the idea would be inconceivable in Vermont where I grew up. Still, if there is a time of year when the landscape looks like Vermont, it's now, when the fall vineyard colors are doing their best sugar maple impression. I'll be enjoying scenes like this last one, as long as they last.

Harvest 2018 Recap: A Vintage Concentrated in both Time and Character

Last Thursday, we brought in the last lingering blocks of Mourvedre, Grenache, and Counoise.  It wasn't as though there was a threat of imminent rain, or heat, or anything else. No, it was just that the grapes were ready. That made it a fitting end to the 2018 harvest, which unfolded under the best conditions I can remember in my 18 years here. No wonder our cellar crew was all smiles:

Unlike many years, where the harvest comes in waves, 2018 was the harvest that never needed to hit the pause button.  From the first serious pick on September 10th, we picked nearly every day until we reached the 85% mark in mid-October. After giving ourselves a long weekend without picking to let the last few blocks finish ripening, we started right back up and picked steadily until we were done on October 25th. You can see steady workflow in the chart below.  It's not quite the classic bell curve, but it's as close as I ever remember seeing, at least on the estate side (in the chart, blue is purchased fruit for the Patelin program, and orange estate grown fruit):

Yields were slightly above average, although the picture varies quite a bit depending on the variety you focus on. Grenache, for example, had one of our best years ever in terms of yields, but Roussanne was down quite a bit. Overall, our yields were off somewhat from the near-record 3.6 tons/acre we saw in the 2017 vintage that had been fueled by the previous winter's near-record rainfall. The complete picture:

Grape	2018 Yields (tons)	2017 Yields (tons)	% Change vs. 2017
Viognier	18.2	18.9	-3.7%
Marsanne	11.8	13.8	-14.5%
Grenache Blanc	43.6	46.4	-6.0%
Picpoul Blanc	9.1	9.7	-6.2%
Vermentino	17.9	22.2	-19.4%
Roussanne	32.6*	41.7	-21.8%
Total Whites	133.2	152.7	-12.8%
Grenache	74.3	73.1	+1.6%
Syrah	44.7	41.5	+7.7%
Mourvedre	64.4	72.9	-11.7%
Tannat	19.8	20.5	-3.4%
Counoise	16.0	18.8	-14.9%
Total Reds	219.2	226.8	-3.4%
Total	352.4	379.5	-7.1%

*If you're wondering why Roussanne has an asterisk, there is still a little Roussanne concentrating in our greenhouses for our Vin de Paille program, to be added to the total. It won't amount to much (a ton, more or less) but it's there. 

Overall yields ended up at 3.32 tons per acre, about 10% above our ten-year average.  We only have two other years in our history in which we've seen yields between 3 and 3.5 tons per acre, which was a little surprising to me, given that this is both our target and our long-term average. But it's worth remembering that the data set includes a number of years just above 3.5 tons/acre (like 2005, 2006, 2010, 2012, and 2017 when ample rainfall combined with excellent growing conditions) as well as vintages reduced by drought to between 2.5 and 3 tons per acre (including 2003, 2004, 2013, 2014, and 2016) and those reduced by frost or shatter to levels around 2 tons per acre (2009, 2011, and 2015).  So, that suggests a narrative for 2018, which joins the 2007 and 2008 vintages in what we think of as a sweet spot: years that show evidence of solid vigor from the vineyard, likely from residual moisture and vine health from recent wet winters, but still reduced somewhat by water stress. Given that last winter was dry but not at crisis levels, and that it followed the ample rainfall in early 2017, this makes sense to me.

Another way that you can get a quick assessment of concentration is to look at average sugars. Since 2007, the average degrees Brix and pH:

Year	Avg. Sugars	Avg. pH
2007	24.42	3.67
2008	23.87	3.64
2009	23.42	3.69
2010	22.68	3.51
2011	22.39	3.50
2012	22.83	3.65
2013	22.90	3.63
2014	23.18	3.59
2015	22.60	3.59
2016	22.04	3.71
2017	22.87	3.74
2018	22.80	3.62

You'll note that 2018's sugars maintained the rebound we saw last year (after lower average sugars in 2015 and 2016) while the average pH declined to something close to our long-term average. Those are both good signs: that the vines were healthy enough to achieve the sugar concentrations we wanted while maintaining their acids later in the season.  The decline in pH from 3.74 to 3.62 might not seem like much, but remember that pH is a logarithmic scale, so this year's grapes contained nearly 32% more acid than last year's.  We're excited about that, and feel that the better acids are a sign of the health of the vines, and the relative lack of stress that the vines were under at harvest time.

Looking back at the degree days that we measured this 2018 growing season provides confirmation for what we felt on the ground: most of the year has been moderate to slightly cool, except for the scorching 6-week stretch between the second week of July and the middle of August. July was our hottest month ever, and August warmer than normal thanks to the first half of the month, but the rest of the year was not. So, while the overall picture suggests a warm year, with about 7% more degree days than average, it's important to remember when and how the heat came, and just as importantly, when it didn't. The chart below shows the cooler spring (1% fewer degree days than normal) and harvest (1.5% fewer degree days than normal) surrounding the hot mid-summer (20% more degree days than average). Note that October's information is for the first 25 days, as we picked our last block on October 25th:

We picked 115 lots this year, with one more (the Roussanne that's a part of the Vin de Paille) still to come.  And we had just enough space on our harvest chalkboard!

The duration of harvest -- 55 days -- was exactly at our average this millennium, and one day longer than 2017. But that raw number too is deceptive, given that the first 10 days of harvest saw us bring in just 10 tons of grapes. The next 45 days saw the remaining 527 tons, so it felt like a shorter, more compact harvest than 2017. If we consider September 10th our first "real" harvest day, that puts the duration at our second-shortest of the last 15 years, longer only than the 2013 vintage that was conducted almost entirely in temperatures around 90 degrees and which finished on October 7th.

In character, it's early to tell what things will be like, but so far, we're excited. I asked Senior Assistant Winemaker Chelsea Franchi to sum up the vintage based on her tastings, and her response was, "I think it's going to be a really strong year for reds; the Mourvedre and Counoise are coloring up fast, which is usually an indicator of a good vintage, and the flavors are powerful and deep. And the whites are insanely aromatic and floral."  Given that Chelsea has been running on 60-hour weeks for the last two months, this is a pretty resounding endorsement.  We'll know more, of course, in coming weeks.

The last project for us for harvest 2018 is to make our first Vin de Paille since 2012.  This traditional dessert wine-making technique involves drying newly-harvested Roussanne clusters on straw, and only pressing and beginning fermentation when they have reached our desired level of concentration -- typically around 38° Brix -- after 2-3 weeks.  [For more details on how and why it's done, see our blog Vin de Paille: A Dessert Wine Making Technique for the Obsessed from a few years back]. The Roussanne we'll be using for this project is currently sitting on the straw, and we expect to bring it in and start fermentation next week. 

Although harvest is over, there's still plenty of work to do in the cellar; because we were harvesting pretty steadily up until the end, we have plenty of tanks still fermenting and on their skins. It's important to remember, should you see a winemaker emerging from his or her work-imposed exile in the next few weeks, that November is still a busy month for cellar work. Cellar Assistant Amanda Weaver got a great shot of a Grenache tank she was digging out late last week. Automated, this is not.

Now that the fruit is in, it's welcome to start raining any time (although, to be fair, it doesn't look like there's any precipitation in the long-term forecast until the second week of November, and even that's uncertain. But whenever it comes, we'll be ready. And as for those "harvest hands"? December can't come soon enough.

Harvest 2018 at the 80% line: It looks like we won't see November grapes, after all

As often happens in early October, the bigger picture of harvest comes into focus and you have a chance to check which of your early harvest assumptions are turning out to be true, and which false. This year, we're receiving validation of most of our important assumptions. Quality has been very high. Quantity has been solid: at long-term averages, or a little above. But timing? It appears that my prediction of a late harvest (one that lasts into November) is looking increasingly unlikely.  As we begin the week of October 15th, we're somewhere around 85% done. And while we still have enough Mourvedre, Counoise and Roussanne hanging that we will have fruit to pick during our upcoming Paso Robles Harvest Wine Weekend festivities (hooray!) I think the chances that we'll still have grapes on the vines a week later are dwindling rapidly.

This isn't a bad thing. We've had such good conditions ever since we began in earnest on September 10th that we haven't really had to push the harvest pause button.  In fact, until this past weekend, we hadn't had consecutive non-picking days since September 6th-9th, at which point we were only 8 tons in, or 1.6% of what we've harvested to date. Our week-by-week harvest log shows the relatively steady intensity of the last five weeks. We didn't maintain the pace of our busiest-ever harvest week (September 10-16, at nearly 133 tons) but we also haven't seen any real pauses, with each week since then falling between 59 and 104 tons:

The weather has provided ideal conditions for this sort of harvest, with plenty of cool to moderate, sunny days and a few modest, short-lived warm-ups embedded within. Looking at the weather since our mid-summer heat wave broke on August 20th shows that we've seen 38 cooler-than-normal days and just 18 whose highs topped out above our long-term averages:

That first warm-up between September 4th and 8th goosed the harvest into gear and produced our incredibly busy week, including most of our early-season grapes like Viognier, Syrah, and Vermentino. The second warm up (September 16-24) brought our mid-season grapes like Grenache, Marsanne, and Tannat into ripeness. Most of our late-season grapes like Counoise, Mourvedre, and Roussanne stayed out until it warmed up modestly last week, and some upper-80s weather that's forecast for later this week should give them the nudge they need to come into the cellar.

It's worth noting that for all that the graph above looks pretty spiky and dramatic, we've really had a very consistent season.  Only 2 days (both early in the harvest season) have topped 100, with just 5 more topping 95.  And only 3 days topped out in the 60s, with just 3 others topping out between 70 and 75.  That means that 43 of the last 56 days have seen  highs between 75 and 95, which are temperatures at which grapevines do a very good job of photosynthesis.

All the remaining vineyard blocks look ready, and in reality nothing is very far away.  If we were facing an early-season rainstorm, or a stretch that was forecast to get up into the 100s, we could pick everything and be happy with it.  But it's a luxury knowing that grapes like the Counoise pictured below can get another week or so of ripening in ideal conditions, and then be picked without stress:

In the cellar, the pause we've seen the past few days has allowed us to get ready for the final push. We've been pressing off one red lot after another, to free up fermentation tanks and allow the wines to finish their fermentations in barrel:

That brings us to another October ritual: cleaning barrels into which we'll put all this new wine to complete its fermentation. I love this shot I got this morning, of Cellar Master Brad Ely steam-cleaning barrels that will become homes for the newly-pressed red wines. Note his hat: last night got down to 41.9°F out here and there's a chance that some of the coldest pockets of Paso Robles might even see frost this week:

But a frost, even in the off chance that it happens isn't a big deal at this time of year.  We'd keep picking nonetheless.  And conditions are forecast to be just about ideal, so we're feeling good about things.  So, with 10 days or so of harvest to go, even if it's no longer a coin flip as to whether or not we'll be picking in November (as I thought it would be two weeks ago) we can still use that coin to predict whether or not we'll have enough lines on our harvest chalkboard to fit everything this year. Let's hope it comes down heads!

Harvest 2018 at its mid-point: moderate to good yields and outstanding quality under ideal weather conditions

After two intense weeks, the cellar is pretty much full and we're in a bit of a lull. The early grapes (think Viognier, Vermentino, Marsanne, Grenache Blanc, Syrah and Pinot Noir) are done or largely done, and while we've made a start with the mid-season grapes like Grenache and Tannat, there's still more out on the vines than there is in the cellar. Mourvedre, Roussanne, and Counoise are still a few weeks off. This ebb and flow is a good chance to let a few fermentations finish in what is a very full cellar: 

The weather has been absolutely ideal, a bit cooler than normal, but with a few short warm-ups mixed in to give the grapes periodic nudges toward ripeness. And even during those warm stretches, the nights have been quite chilly, leading to some remarkable diurnal temperature swings. From the Paso Robles Wine Country Alliance's weather stations this past Wednesday:

The 48.5° swing that we saw at Tablas Creek was one of the smaller ones in the area. The Templeton Gap's swing was 57.8°, while the Adelaida West station, just a few miles away from us, was 62.3°.  That's remarkable, even here in Paso Robles where massive diurnal swings are commonplace. But it meant that even when it was hot, it was only hot for a few hours, with the vast majority of the day in the 85°-95° range which is ideal for grapevine photosynthesis. 

With the first handful of varieties harvested, we have the first chance to wrap our heads around yields.  It looks like yields are down from 2017, but still above the levels we saw during our drought. The varieties we've finished harvesting are down a total of 12.8%. Given that 2017 was up 21.8% over 2016's more or less average yields, we still seem like we're in good shape. The details on the grapes we've finished with:

Grape	2017 Yields (tons)	2018 Yields (tons)	% Change vs. 2017
Viognier	18.9	14.4	-23.8%
Marsanne	13.8	11.8	-14.5%
Grenache Blanc	46.4	33.7	-27.4%
Vermentino	22.2	21.7	-2.3%
Syrah	41.5	42.6	+2.7%
Pinot Noir	8.7	7.9	-9.2%
Total so Far	151.5	132.1	-12.8%

In terms of timing, as September moves into October, we're still about two weeks behind what we have grown used to in the 2012-2017 run, and haven't picked up any significant ground since the beginning of harvest. We picked Syrah this year between September 14th and 25th.  Last year, it came in between August 31st and September 20th. The 2018 Viognier came in between August 31st and September 20th. In 2017, its range was August 30th to September 4th. By the end of September last year, we'd picked 90% of our Grenache. This year, we're only 24 tons in, or about a third of what we expect to harvest.  I'd give us less than a 50/50 chance of being done by the end of October this year. That's not particularly scary; in the 2000's we harvested into November more than half the vintages. But it's been a while. 

The quality has been outstanding so far: terrific flavors and ideal numbers from fruit that has looked like it could have come of the table at our local farmers' market. And the fermentations have smelled wonderful. We've been wishing for scratch-and-sniff Internet, so we can share more than just how nice fermentations (like the Pinot Noir pictured below) look:

Looking forward, we expect to see a lot of Grenache and Tannat the next week or two, and we'll likely start cherry-picking Roussanne and Mourvedre, to get the ripest clusters into the cellar so they don't raisin while we wait for the majority of the fruit to reach maturity. Scenes like Saturday morning's, where Tannat bins spill from the crushpad onto our staff parking lot, will be commonplace:

There is a little uncertainty in next week's forecast; the interaction between a Pacific low pressure system and the remnants of Hurricane Rosa will likely cause some showers on Wednesday.  But with the forecast predicted to warm up and dry out after, that's not a big deal.  At worst, we may not pick for a couple of days.  But if you're in the desert Southwest, this is something to prepare for:

#HurricaneRosa: Maximum sustained winds 105 mph, moving north at 12 mph, located 840 miles south of #SanDiego. Rosa will weaken tonight-Tuesday, but it's remnant moisture will bring rainfall to #SoCal mountains and deserts late Sun-Mon night. #cawx pic.twitter.com/XDwbzGdjm5

— NWS San Diego (@NWSSanDiego) September 29, 2018

Meanwhile, we'll enjoy the beautiful fermentation aromas in the cellar, and the colors of the grapes on the vines. And hope that the second half of harvest continues under equally good conditions as we've seen for the first half.

Yeah, that slow start to the 2018 harvest? That's history.

I walked into our lab today and Chelsea turned to me and said, "so, do you remember last week when I said I was bored"?  Yeah, not so much any more.  As often happens, even in years like this one that start slowly, there comes a day where you realize that everywhere you look you see grapes.  This year, today was that day.

What did I see?  Grenache, waiting in bins to be direct pressed for the Patelin de Tablas Rosé. Marsanne, waiting on the crushpad (there was more in the cellar) for the press to open up.  Our first Syrah arriving for the Patelin de Tablas red.  And that wasn't all.  We began the day with a night pick of the last of the Pinot Noir from my parent's house, and finished, 29 tons later, with eight bins of Viognier off our oldest block.

Those 29.68 tons, on top of twenty-eight tons yesterday and sixteen more on Tuesday, put us just over 77 tons for the week.  Yes, that's a lot of grapes, and there's more to come tomorrow, Saturday, and likely Sunday as well.  All told, we'll top 100 tons this week, which will make it one of our busiest weeks of the harvest.  Last year (our largest harvest ever at 642 tons, in 9 weeks) we saw three weeks top 100 tons, with the busiest tallying 126 tons.  We'll likely challenge that this week.

Happily, the fruit looks great, and the conditions are absolutely perfect. Today topped out at 83°F here, while last night dropped down to 40.7°F.  That means that any additional ripening is going to happen slowly, and it keeps the harvesting window open.  And the long-term forecast is benign, with similar weather expected for the whole outlook.  That's more like what we'd normally expect in late October, not mid-September.  But it's in keeping with the prolonged cool stretches that we've seen all year, at least outside of the six scorching weeks in mid-summer. 

So, we'll enjoy a cellar that is filling up with grapes:

And that chalkboard, that just a few days ago was a literal clean slate? That's starting to fill up too. 

Harvest 2018 Begins with a Whisper

A little more than a month ago, I predicted that the 2018 harvest would begin sometime in the first half of September.  I was almost right.  We actually got our first fruit -- a couple of tons of Viognier -- on August 31st.  About five tons of Viognier came in for our Patelin de Tablas Blanc on September 5th.  And then, this morning, we picked our first red grapes: 2.6 tons of Pinot Noir from my parents' vineyard:

How does this leisurely beginning to the 2018 harvest stack up against other recent years? Much slower. The first 11 days of the 2018 harvest saw 10.64 tons of fruit arrive in the cellar, which is just 16% of our average (67.34 tons in the first 11 days) this decade. The decade has included cool and hot vintages, early and late starts, and even in the years with the slowest starts we saw at least triple the amount of fruit arriving in the cellar during the first week and a half of harvest.  So, we really are seeing an outlier this year. The below chart will illustrate, and I've also tossed on the chart the date of our first Full Circle Pinot Noir harvest, for comparison:

Year	Tons, First 11 Days	Date of First Pinot Harvest
2018	10.64	September 10th
2017	156.06	August 29th
2016	83.41	August 23rd
2015	80.78	August 22nd
2014	40.48	August 28th
2013	81.67	August 23rd
2012	120.95	September 6th
2011	37.57	September 22nd
2010	32.03	September 28th

You can see, in addition to how unusual this slow start to harvest is, just how much later harvest has been this year than in other recent years. The first Pinot Noir pick is a good marker for us, because it always comes from the same small vineyard.  We're more than two weeks later than our 2013-2017 average, though not as far behind as what we saw the historically cool back-to-back 2010 and 2011 vintages.  

Although we've seen a brief warmup the last few days, it's been quite cool, overall, since mid-August, and we're forecast for more cool weather this and next week.  So, we may not see things catch up much.  That's not worrying, at least not yet.  Longer hang times are a good thing, as is the ability to pick at just the right moment, instead of being forced into a pick in the middle of a heat spike.  Of course, if we don't catch up at all, and finish harvest still two-plus weeks behind where we've been the last five years, there's a better-than-even chance we'll be harvesting in November. We wouldn't have thought that unusual a recently as a few years ago (between 2000 and 2011 harvest stretched into November six times) but it hasn't happened since 2011.  It does appear, as I wrote this summer, that we're looking at something of a throwback vintage. 

The slower start to harvest has meant that we've been able to get out and get good samples on most of our early blocks, and we like what we see.  Clusters are small but not tiny.  The vines appear healthy, recovered after the long mid-summer heat marathon.  Numbers are ideal for us at this stage.  And the fruit looks great.  A bin of Viognier looks fresh and clean:

The fruit in the press smells great, like peaches and flowers, and the rich, yeasty scents of fermentation are beginning to permeate the cellar:

And now that we finally have some red grapes in the cellar, we can really get things going.  Please join me in welcoming the 2018 harvest.

What a difference a few weeks makes: From hot to cool as we wait for a delayed harvest

If you didn't know how beautiful a fog bank can be, you haven't spent a summer in Paso Robles.  Yesterday, I returned to the vineyard after a weekend in San Francisco to find that I'd somehow brought back the weather with me.  The daytime high was just 77°F. The night before dropped down to 43°F. And there was a big, beautiful fog bank sitting over the Santa Lucia Mountains to our west:

Now this weather pattern isn't shocking for us, even in the middle of the summer. Although we get plenty of hot days, we normally see a pattern that builds in heat, tops out over 100°F for a few days, then breaks and we see cooler weather with days topping out in the upper 70s or lower 80s for a few days before it starts to build.

But it was shocking in that this summer, we hadn't seen the breaks hardly at all.  In fact, between July 5th and August 19th -- a stretch of six and a half weeks --  the lowest high temperature that we saw was 87°, and the lowest low temperature we saw was 53°. We had 22 days top 100°F. Our average high was 98.8° and our average low 57.6°. 

Happily, things have changed over the last ten days.  Every one of the days since August 20th would have been the lowest high and the lowest low in the previous 6-week stretch. We averaged a high of 83.3° and a low of 48.5°. And the long-term forecast calls for continued moderate weather.  The vineyard appears grateful for the respite; the vines look a lot less stressed to me than they did a couple of weeks back.

In some ways, this year reminds me of 2015, where we had alternating cold and hot months all the way from budbreak in April to the close of harvest in October.  Although the periods have lasted longer this year, we are seeing the same cold-hot-cold pattern.  I'm hoping that yields aren't as scarce as they were in 2015, when we were deep in the throes of our drought and also saw cold, windy weather during the May flowering period that reduced crop loads on our early grapes by as much as 70%, but it's certain that they'll be down from our 2017 levels.  How much is still to be determined.  But in character, the 2015s were outstanding, so if that's our baseline, I'm not unhappy.

Because we've largely avoided the temperatures where grapevines photosynthesize optimally (between 85°F and 95°F) we're still trending behind on our harvest. We're thinking it might begin slowly at the end of next week.  And we're OK with that.  In my trek around the vineyard, I tasted berries from Grenache, Grenache Blanc, Tannat, and Roussanne, and none of them were anywhere near ripe.  In fact, most were still only partway through veraison, a month after I wrote about it.  A few photos will demonstrate.  First, Tannat, where you can see the characteristic blue-black berries intermixed with pink and even green berries at the top of the cluster:

Next, Grenache Blanc. It's harder to see veraison in white grapes, but you can see some berries with a yellow tint, while others toward the center of the cluster are still more green:

And finally Roussanne, which is still resolutely green, not showing any of the characteristic russet coloring that gives the grape its name:

It's worth recapitulating how much later we are than other recent years. Four of the last five years, we'd already started picking off our estate as of August 28th, and the fifth (2017) we were just two days from beginning and had already received some Viognier for the Patelin Blanc.  This year? Not so much. We've gone from weather that was too cool to ripen grapes fast to weather that was too hot to gapes ripen fast right back to cool weather, with virtually no transition either time.  We're out sampling all our Patelin vineyards, but nothing is imminent. The cellar team has been scrubbing equipment from top to bottom, and everything is sparkling clean. We've installed some new mini-foudres for our white program. The table is set... we're just waiting for the guests to arrive.

Yes, July really was hot. But veraison still arrived late. What gives?

A month ago, I felt like I was tempting fate when I characterized the 2018 summer as "benign". Well, so much for benign. July was the hottest month we've ever seen here at Tablas Creek, with an average high temperature of 96.5 and an average overall temperature of 76.5.  Fourteen days topped 100, and only seven -- all toward the beginning of the month -- failed to get into the 90s. In terms of degree days, July saw us accumulate 844 degree days, fully 28% more than our average of 659. That's a big increase over what is already our hottest month:

Given the heat and the season, it really wasn't a surprise when I got an email from Neil on Monday with a photo of Syrah undergoing veraison. Veraison marks the point where a grape stops accumulating mass and starts accumulating sugar. More visibly, red grapes start their color change from green to purple, while white grapes take on more of a yellow tint. Both red and white grapes start to soften. [For more about what's happening chemically, check out this veraison post from the archives.] A few photos of Syrah clusters will give you a sense of what things look like now:

And:

It's worth remembering that most of the vineyard is still totally green.  Syrah is the first red grape to enter veraison, and I couldn't find even a hint of color on any of the others. And, that photo was from the top of our tallest hill, which is always more advanced than areas lower down both because they started earlier since their last frost was later, and because they're under more stress due to scarcity of water. But we know that once we see Syrah, the other grapes follow along in fairly short order.

One of veraison's principal values to a winery is as a marker: this landmark comes roughly six weeks before the onset of harvest, and gives us our best estimate for when harvest will begin.  But, of course, six weeks is a rough average, and can be influenced by the weather that we get in the interim, as well as by the amount of fruit the vines are carrying.  For example, in 2014 our earliest-ever veraison (noted on July 9th) was mitigated by a very cool August, and we started harvest 45 days later, on August 23rd. By contrast, 2016's first veraison was noted on July 13th, and combined with a very warm August to produce our earliest-ever beginning to harvest, just 36 days later. The last dozen years are compiled in the chart below, with each year linked to my blog post about that year's veraison:

Year	First Veraison Noted	Harvest Begins	# of Days
2007	July 20	August 28	39
2008	July 23	September 3	42
2009	July 20	September 1	43
2010	July 30	September 16	49
2011	August 5	September 20	47
2012	July 25	September 5	42
2013	July 17	August 26	40
2014	July 9	August 23	45
2015	July 18	August 26	39
2016	July 13	August 18	36
2017	July 20	August 30	40
2018	July 29	?	?

Using the range of durations between first veraison and first harvest (36 to 49 days) we can have good confidence that we'll begin picking sometime between September 3rd and September 16th. I'm guessing we start toward the early end of that range, given the warmth of the summer so far and the relatively moderate crop levels we've been estimating.

Given the heat in July, it's worth addressing why the vineyard hasn't caught up more from the roughly two weeks late it was after flowering. I'd point the finger at two culprits. First, we did catch up a bit; I'd estimate that we're more like 10 days behind than the two weeks we were in early July.  And second, grapevines photosynthesize optimally at temperatures between 30 and 35 Celsius (86 and 95 Fahrenheit). Two-thirds of our days in July got above 95 degrees, which means that the grapevines actually slowed down photosynthesis in the heat of the day as they closed the pores on their leaves to reduce dehydration.

What's next for the vineyard? We'll watch the different grapes go through veraison. Syrah will be followed by Mourvedre, then Grenache soon, and finally Counoise. In the cellar, we'll be getting the last of the year's bottling done so there's space in barrels and tanks for the coming crush, and starting the process of pulling out and cleaning all the tanks, barrels, and equipment we'll be using once harvest begins. Everyone will be storing up on sleep.

And now we know -- roughly at least -- how much time we have  left before everything shifts into harvest mode. Stay tuned.