This is a summary of our long and painful 2011 harvest:

OREGON:

We brought some Riesling from Oregon but also some Pinot Noir and Pinot Gris for our new Oregon winery project. It was a challenging harvest in OR overall following an unseasonably cool spring and summer (Thank you la Nina). We thought that all would be saved by a great August and a promising September but the weather turned cold mid-September slowing down ripening considerably. We were aggressive with yield reduction to allow what was left to ripen a bit more. The saving grace has been the dry weather which has reduced fungal pressure in OR tremendously. We saw little or no rot on any varietal. Most folks started to harvest mid-October wrapping harvest in 2 to 3 weeks – bit of a flash harvest ahead of the rain that are in the forecast as far as the eye can see now. Overall the fruit is low in sugar (21 Brix) but fruit flavors are ripe with no greenness, and colors on the Pinot Noir are very decent indeed. I think that overall it will be a nice vintage with delicate flavors that will reward wineries that tend to go for elegance against power. The Riesling was low Brix and is slotted for a Kabinett style.

WASHINGTON:

Same pattern than OR in WA minus the rain factor and plus frost issues. The summer was very cool and 2011 will be remembered as one of the coldest vintage on record, cooler than 2010 even – 2011 is the 8th coldest year on record sandwiched between 1976 and 1970. The yields were quite lower than last year due to some winter frost damage and some aggressive thinning after bloom. WA harvest as a whole will probably be 20% below average yield which has probably helped to get most fruit to good ripeness. Acids are high and everyone brought some nice botrytis with the fruit. Overall it is a little riper of a vintage (bit weird but the acids were much lower than 2010) for us and we will be able to make every Riesling style we usually produce. We are leaving a few acres out to see if this is a good ice wine year, we might get something good out of this cold weather!

Just a quick note to display my gratitude to the sun god for giving us a great end of August. GDD are catching up with last year and last year saw a disastrous September which so far does not look like a repeat this year. We might have a great vintage on our hands…..

The 2010 harvest is now all finished for Pacific Rim. It was the latest season for us  and probably for Washington as a whole. Our last grapes came on November 17^th, the latest end of harvest ever for us. Looking back, I think that the cool spring delayed ripening greatly and we never caught up really. Thankfully a good Indian summer allowed us to stir away from a complete disaster – There must be some feary looking over our shoulders. At the end, the fermenting wines are showing great natural acids which will be fine for sweeter Rieslings as the sugar will rebalance things perfectly – we have decided not to make any Dry Riesling this year and focus on the sweeter styles – One has to work with what mother nature gives you.

We have seen large botrytis infections that dried out nicely but it ended up lowering yields dramatically. I expect a 20% drop in yield overall in Washington for mature Riesling vineyards. It is not clear right now if the new Riesling plantings will offset the loss from their older brethren – I suspect the total Riesling harvest to be down 10% overall versus the record 2009 harvest for the State. The botrytis flavors are adding a very nice fourth dimension to the sweet styles and the quality of sweet Rieslings is very high. Several wineries (us included) will make a noble rot infected Riesling this year.

Overall it was a very unusual harvest for Washington that should reward patient and skilled winemakers. It is definitely a vintage that will be made in the cellar.

All good things have to come to an end, so celebrate the end this long and challenging harvest. We are in the final stretch and will be picking the Biodynamic Wallula vineyard this week and next and will be closing our doors around the 20th of November – the latest harvest in recent history. The preliminary results are showing high acid wines, nice botrytis tone and low yields overall. The high acids will push us to produce sweeter styles this year to balance out the extra acids. The botrytis that we usually desperately look for in normal vintages has overwhelmed us in 2010 – the wines should reflect a more waxy, honey like character this vintage. Lower yields will guarantee a short supply of WA Riesling this year, it will be interesting to see how the market receives a very Germanic vintage from Washington – me like it despite the added stress, you?

The results from the GDD race are in, 2003 will end at 2325 which will put it in on par with 1974 and 1970 – 2003 is now the 9th coolest year in WA on record (http://rieslingrules.com/the_book/2010/09/20/). The final GDD chart for the year is below:

As I have hinted before, we will probably not make a dry Riesling this year except for our Wallula Biodynamic and Solstice Rieslings single vineyards (they will probably be close to 1% RS so not fully “trocken”). As far as cool and new wines we are exploring, we are still trying to make a decent TBA, very scary wine to make, the jury is still out on this one so stay tune. Another experiment this year is a 100% carbonic maceration Gamay – that is also a bit of a work in progress right now.

Let’s check in in two weeks when all the grapes are in.

Here we are, October 13th and only 40% through picking our Rieslings, watching the weather channel like a new episode of the Sopranos as every night we are getting closer to freezing temperature – a freeze would end our growing season – please not quite yet, hang on Indian Summer! We still have 60% of our Riesling grapes hanging in the vineyard and we need more time to see our acids go down. Regionally, we have brought in most of our Yakima Valley Rieslings and have not yet started picking our Wallula vineyard Riesling in the Horse Heaven Hills. So far what we are seeing from the Yakima Valley are high acid, low brix, good botrytis (ie noble rot) – great for sweeter Rieslings, not so great for drier styles. The heavy botrytis is allowing us to attempt a 100% botrytized harvested wine (TBA in Germany, Selection Grain Noble in Alsace) – stay tuned for an update on this new adventure. If we don’t get fried by below freezing temperatures over the week end, the forecast is for another 10 days of mild sunny weather and this would help tremendously to finish the season and get Wallula perfectly ripe. This is probably one of the most intellectually interesting season ever for us and I believe will keep proving that at Pacific Rim, we know our Rieslings.

We are just getting started picking Riesling and we are about 3 weeks behind our usual schedule. The delay in ripening is due to a very cool growing season (it could end up being the coolest on record, see this earlier post on this). We are seeing two additional outcomes from the cool season, high acid and large botrytis infections.

We will have to see how high those acids come in, but I have never experienced acids that high, will they drop by the time we pick? can we rebalance with sugar? Will we have to de-acidify? Time will tell.

Botrytis is spreading quickly, especially in the Yakima Valley – big pad in the back for splitting our sourcing between warmer climate Riesling (Wallula Vineyard) and the Yakima Valley; it will really work as a good insurance policy this year. We usually don’t have much botrytis in Washington (at its best, botrytis is also called noble rot) and I look for it as a complexity agent. Well, we are getting it big this year but I that does not make me that happy. Why? -> a lot of botrytis brings a few winemaking issues including very low yields, high oxidation, off aromas and can lead on filtration nightmares. Awesome, no? we will also have to see when we bring the grapes in what we can do at the winery to mitigate those winemaking issues – it will add cost, no doubt.

At this point we have to compromise between the high acids, the botrytis, the low yields etc… I really feel like we have been teleported to Germany for one year.

Quick post to show you the last 41 years of cumulative GDD data (Yakima Valley) that I got today:

 Exciting table, no? The warmest years were 1987, 2003, 1992, 1990 and 1998. The coolest were 1984, 1971, 1975, 1999 and 1980. Right now we are trailing slightly behind 1999 so we could have the coldest year on record. What does that mean for quality? Well, it will really depends of night time temperature I believe. If we can hang our fruit without a night time frost for another 5 to 6 weeks, we will have a great vintage like 1999. If not, we will have a repeat of 1984 which, I have heard, was a disaster.

Finally a good week of sunshine but let’s not get used to that. Temperatures are dropping in the low 70’s again by the week end. So far our growing season looks awfully like 1999 which, I recall, was a fantastic year for Washington wines. Usually cool years (like 2010 or 1999) are very beneficial to high acid and long hang time favoring very flavorful and intense wines. That’s the theory at least. I am still very nervous remembering the hard frost event we had last year in early October (11th or so) which just stopped the growing season (See this link for this bad memory). It was OK last year because we had a warm year and were ahead, but it would be really ugly if this would happen in a cool year such as the one we are witnessing in 2010. Stay tuned. Below is the all powerful and telling GDD chart.

Harvest is approching and it is time for us to look at our grapes sourcing and make sure all is in balance (i.e. we have just enough of everything for each wine we make). Below is a synopsis of what harvest will look like for us:

- 3,181 tons of grapes or 203,000 cases of wines – our largest harvest yet

- 92.2% Riesling, 97.1% White grapes (Gewurzt and Chenin). We have a little Gamay coming this year (plus our usual Barbeara, Sangiovese and Primitivo blend)

- 1/3 of our Riesling from Wallula 2/3 from the lower Yakima Valley

Next week I will be touring all our blocks to confirm quality and volume. Ready, set, Go!

Just coming back from a quick trip to raspberry land also known to us as Mount Vernon in the skagit valley of western Washington. It is there that Mike and Jean Jungquist grow our special selection of Raspberry that we call internally the “Morrison”. We’ve selected that raspberry varietal because of its low seed bitterness and its crazy high raspberry flavors. Mike and his family gow one field for us (picture below) so it is really a single vineyard raspberry! It is a major commitment from our team but this is what it take to make a primo raspberry infusion like framboise. The field yields about 40 tons of raspberry every year. We’ve discussed experimenting with a few newer selections this year, so I might be up for a raspberry clone tasting this summer (they breed about 180 new clones every year) – raspberry fans send me a note and I’ll take you up!

This is the time of the year when we are bottling our first Rieslings blends. This year, the first blends to go to bottle are our Riesling made from organic (4% Residual Sugar), our Sweet Riesling (about 8% Residual sugar) and our new Riesling (2% Residual Sugar – another post about this Riesling later this week). It is always very satisfying to come to this point after months of work in the vineyard and at the winery. The challenge, and somewhat the fun part of the job, for a Riesling winery like us is blending smartly the different vineyard lots we produce in order to optimize each style we make (we make nine different Rieslings). In order to have plenty of options for blending we make many different lots of wines that are based on the vineyard they came from. The selection for those lots starts during the growing season where we usually sort each vineyard based on their intrinsic potential that year:  sparkling base potential, dryer Riesling potential and sweeter Riesling potential. Based on that designated potential, the grapes are picked either earlier in the season (for the sweeter styles so they have more acid to balance the sugar) or later (for the drier styles).

When the grapes are picked, the juices are evaluated pre fermentation to make sure that the designated style we had of this particular vineyard still makes sense. At that point we also refine the target style beyond sweet and dry based on flavor profile, sugar content, acid levels, phenolic content and the Biodynamic or Organic status of the juices. For Dry styles we divide the juices for sparkling, Dry Riesling, Solstice Single Vineyard and Wallula Biodynamic Single Vineyard. For Sweet styles we divide the juices for Riesling (2% RS), Organic and Sweet Riesling. Each lot is then allocated a target final residual sugar and we stop the fermentations based on our juice evaluation in most cases. Finally comes blending times where we pretty much review every single fermentation lot and we always tweak the blends left and right based on our desired final flavor profile, acid level, phenolic level and sugar level. That makes usually for a busy November/December.

Both vineyards are owned by James Willard (Jim) and are in the lower Yakima Valley. Solstice is the source of our single vineyard Solstice Riesling and our block is 30 year old. The grapes are always concentrated (we go for about 3 tons/acre in that old block). The vineyard itself has a very organic feel to it (See picture below). This year the crop looks great with a modest canopy at this point.

Jim was pulling out an old Cabernet Sauvignon vineyard and he showed me the old vines (35+ year old), they were quite massive. Check this impressive picture of Jim vs the old Cabernet:

Skyline is the future source of a newly Gamay vineyard for us. The vines are now two years old so the first crop will be in 2010. Very exciting. Pictures of the growing babies below.