When it comes to picking grapes, harvesting by machine is the best way in my book. It is incredibly efficient because the grapes go from being on the vine to crushed and into a chilled tank within the span of a half an hour. When grapes are picked by hand, that process takes a minimum of four hours.

If you visit Wine Country during Harvest and happen to take a drive in the middle of the night, you would almost certainly come across a machine harvester at work. Many people wonder why we harvest at night. It’s simple...

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I am the lucky one during harvest – I spend my mornings sampling, measuring, tasting, evaluating each lot of Chardonnay to ensure that the fermentations are progressing well. Just after the grapes arrive at the winery, I check their sugar content with a refractometer by putting a few drops of juice onto this hand-held instrument. Within it, there is a scale that reads the sugar level by refracting light through the juice. I taste the juice and record the grape aromas, the sugar content and the details of the fruit – which vineyard block and clone the grapes came from, the tonnage and the quality of the fruit. A day or two later, the juice is inoculated with yeast and I begin measuring the fermentation rates with a hydrometer. This tool is a glass tube that is weighed on one end and measures the density of the sugar and the temperature of the liquid by floating in the fermenting juice.

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There are two days of the year that I look forward
to the most in the vineyard…the first day of Harvest and the last.

This year the first day arrived earlier than normal, and that is just fine by me! The vineyard crew eagerly awaits this day all season. Our hard work has produced another bountiful crop, and there’s much excitement as we prepare to bring it in.

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Once Autumn arrives, Mother Nature dictates our schedules in the cellar and vineyard. At the beginning of August this year, we anticipated our earliest Harvest yet because the growing season started early. Temperatures were warmer and the conditions drier than in previous years. This led us to believe that Harvest would start about two weeks ahead of normal.

Or so we thought. Mother Nature always keeps us on our toes.

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