Crush Continues, Will It Ever End?

I expected this crush season to be very short; back in early September it looked as if everything was ripening at once, due to an unusual temperature spike, and we would be overwhelmed with incoming fruit. Well, not so. After that brief heat spell the temp moderated and now things are being r e a l l y stretched out.

On October 11 I barreled down the Herzog Petite Sirah, 18 barrels. Last Saturday we pressed the remaining Soucie Zinfandel. Yesterday I pressed two tons of the Maley Zinfandel and crushed two tons of fruit from our Napa Valley Combsville Cabernet vineyard that is destined for the 07 Singularity bottling. This coming Saturday we’ve got more Petite Verdot coming in, and sometime in mid-November, if the weather holds, we’ll pick a couple of tons of Soucie Zin for our Zinlady late harvest wine.

I’ve got a new yeast for the Combsville Cab - a new, future, product from Lafford. The yeast was isolated from Chateau Latour in Bordeaux and only 10 kilograms were made available in the U.S. this year. I’ve got a 500 gram brick of it to use on the Cab, and I’m really looking forward to how this yeast turns out.

The First Sip weekend, an event sponsored by the Lodi-Woodbridge Winegrape Commission, is coming up on November 10 and 11. All Lodi wineries are participating and we’ve got a lot of stuff planned. We’ll have a Master Cooper on site from Canton Cooperage demonstrating barrel building and Reds Regan will be creating a new painting inside the winery. Also, there’ll be music and some sort of foodie items too.

I’ve got a lot of work to do between now and then to get ready, mostly cleaning up and organizing the winery space. I know I’m ready for crush to wind down.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, October 23rd, 2007 at 10:30 am and is filed under Winemaking, Winery Events, Day To Day. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.