Just as we enter the “no-surf” season on the shores of the North Coast (summer brings windy days with choppy, small waves around here), we start to get an idea of what this fall’s harvest may look like. If you live here or kept in touch, you probably know we farmers were predicting gloom and doom early in the season, when constant rains threatened to disturb flowering and setting of the crop. We are farmers, we always love to complain about how the weather is messing our plans… Now that the frost danger is over and it looks like we did not suffer any major mold outbreak, we were all focused on fruit set; the process that creates a cluster of berries from the flowering grape. Some alarms were sounding up and down the valleys, saying that the flower caps were “sticking” and predicting a very poor crop. Little did we know nature had a different surprise in store for us… something way worse than a bad or small crop… looks like it is about to hand us a good quality HUGE crop, or at least above average (subject to change).
Fruit set in Malbec cluster
With wine prices depressed, the economy in the dumps, huge amounts of cheap imported wines being dumped on our shores and fair amounts of bulk wines still sittting in tanks and barrels unbottled – the last thing we need is a huge California grape crop. So, life is good in wine country, now that we have something new to complain about… after all, we ARE farmers!
