Weather  
Today

Dry and sunny today, with a high of 70. A bit brisk outside as I'm writing this at 7AM. Rains of two days ago are soaked in and dried off, with no moisture projected for the next 10 days. Saturday high 75, Sunday 85, then in the 80s until a week from now, so we'd better get ready to pick fruit quickly and precisely.

Weather To-Date
Two days of rain this week dropped 0.46 inches of rain. No problem for soils to accept it. A little botrytis in ripest Stoller Vineyards fruit urges us to pick that, so beginning today.

Temperatures this month have been average to warm ... 18 of 28 days have exceeded 75F for high temperatures, 12 days over 80F ... with upcoming week similar.

Cheryl Receives Three New Fermentors

Harvest  2001 September 28, 2001

AND TODAY IT BEGINS!

	The First Morning of Harvest

Nights are cool, days warm and yellowing, so it must be time to harvest.

Today preparation pays off as we bring our first fruit to winery, Pinot noir, Clone 115 from Stoller Vineyards, around 10 tons. It will be practice for our new crew and a signal that we can stop pre-work. We have bottled Pinot noir from last harvest in three runs over the last month, over 5000 cases, with the last barrels of Ridgecrest Single Vineyard Pinot being racked to tank today for bottling after harvest.

Precise Cropload of One Cluster per Shoot on Corral Creek Pinot noir

Our vineyards have had great ripening weather the last month, are on-time for harvest and have perfect set yields -- we were given 2+ tons per acre initially and, with assiduous use of shears to drop crop to precise levels, should be ripe before Fall rains and with great concentration.

Mike Eyres Cleaning A Tank in Preparation

Our new crew includes John Wallace, winemaker at Chard Farm in New Zealand's Central Otago; Mike Eyres, another Kiwi who has worked at our friend and past two-harvest veteran Lynnette Hudson's Pegasus Bay, as well as Babich; Pamela Estay, from Chile's Vina Morande who will stretch my Spanish.

Mark Rosenstein

A great group of volunteers will also help Cheryl, Michael, and me, including initially Mark Rosenstein, an old --scratch that-- a long-time friend who owns Marketplace restaurant in Asheville, North Carolina, and has written a definitive book on apples in all their manifestations -- cultural, historical, beverage, and culinary -- called In Praise of Apples. Mark is cooking some, helping rack, sampling vineyards and, today, crushing fruit.

Wish us luck. Ma Nature has given us a good start.