The completion of harvest is always a series of beautiful moments. A moment of the finality of our fruit growing efforts . . . a moment of judgment about the choices we made in the vineyard . . . the start of our winemaking . . . a moment of confidence that we have great choices ahead of us in the crafting wines that reflect the potential of our particular piece of land.
And yes, before I go on, as you can see, we use mechanical harvesters with sorters. They provide us with great results. Only the berries reach the winery. Very few stems to add undesirable green flavors. Purists may frown and shake their heads but technology has its advantages.
A writer recently told us that he thought that our focus on just Chardonnay was really about the place we grow our grapes and he was pleased that we were memorializing the terroir in each of our vintage years. Very well said.
This year wasn't without its challenges. We had a great start with a lot of soil moisture. Budding was early but vine growth slowed as the Spring weather had some cool days, cool days that unfortunately allowed frosts on our budding clusters. We had the usual and universal tussle with powdery mildew and we stopped it early, before it had impacted our fruit in any way.
The result of climate and growing factors was a 30% reduction in yields by the time of harvest. Since the market is in slight oversupply at the moment, we were good with that.
During this season, we experimented with trellis techniques to help us cope with our warming climate. For several of our vineyard blocks, we used a modified vertical trellis with a focus on putting more air through the canopy and keeping developing fruit in the shade during hot afternoons. The trials were a success and we will implement our learnings during the 2025 vintage year.
Fruit quality was excellent. We had the ideal combination of hot and cool days. Net net, the fruit matured about 10 days sooner than our normal.
We chose to take the fruit early. One of our routines is to constantly walk the vineyard blocks -- a benefit of owning them -- and taste the fruit in the weeks before harvest. We also augment our judgment with the objective numbers from chemical analytical measurements of sugar and acids.
The ideal moment of harvest is a convergence of the factors that make great wine. And no calculator gives the answer. You use your best judgment to land on the right spot.
We are very pleased by our initial tastes of the still fermenting wine. The fruit and acids are in balance and, at this early stage, very pleasing to the nose and mouth.
Our wine style this year will have slightly less alcohol by volume. To do that, we purposely harvested before the sugars peaked. The added benefits of an earlier harvest include better physical fruit quality at the crusher and natural acidity that plays well -- smoothly -- with fruit flavors.
Thank you for your continued support.