West Coast Harvest 2020

Our European grower harvest reports 2020 can be accessed here.

Harvest is interesting. Tremendous growing season. Very optimal start to the year, combining early sun and later spring rain gave the plants a great head start. The rain lasted into flowering so yields are very low (i.e. expensive) but a cooler growing season matched up well.

Then everything on the West coast caught on fire. The smoke is going to be a player in some wines this year. East side of the valley the issues are terrible.

But then we had two serious rains, which really does seem to have washed most things off pretty completely.

Biggest take aways are that the raw materials are tremendous, but you should have in-depth conversations with everyone who produces wines from 2020 about smoke issues.

Marcus Goodfellow
Goodfellow Family Cellars, Willamette Valley OR
October 2 2020

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We’re excited with the vintage thus far! The harvest is a bit earlier than expected, and with a couple challenging heat waves. The first came August 19th-21st and had us hustling afterwards to clean out sunburn and heat damaged fruit from the more exposed, younger sections of Sanford and Benedict Vineyard (block 4 Wente chardonnay and block 9B AS1 clone pinot noir). I was thrilled to see most of the vineyards were resilient through severe heat, the vines (at least 20 years old – 49 years old) held up quite well with a modest irrigation just prior. The watering maintained the vines and held the fruit chemistry to near perfectly balanced numbers, with ever so slightly higher pHs, and beautiful flavor development. Fermentations are moving along wonderfully and at this point we’re 90% in with just one more pass to be made for chardonnay and cabernet sauvignon still hanging. Our thoughts are with those more impacted by the fires and the smoke, fortunately we were not directly impacted.

Ryan Deovlet
Deovlet Wines, Santa Barbara CA
September 14, 2020

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We are intending to start the harvest next Monday, September 13th, but the breakout of wildfires to the east and within the Willamette Valley has made harvesting and grape damage a very real concern. For the moment, we need to get through the next 2-3 hot and dry days after no rain for nearly 3 months. It’s a very precarious situation after what had been a nice growing season this past summer. Yields are already low from a poor set at flowering due to the last of the season’s rains. We will have more to report in the coming weeks, but in the meantime, we hope our neighbors and friends stay safe, that our first responders can contain the fires and that the weather turns for the better.

[Photo above is Johan Vineyard in Oregon’s Willamette Valley with smoke filling the sky.]

Kate Norris and Tom Monroe
Division Winemaking Co., Willamette Valley OR
September 9, 2020

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Well it’s pretty crazy to say the least. So far we have brought in our Russian River Valley Sauvignon Blanc and a Clarksburg Grenache. We are confident smoke taint will not be an issue with these lots.

Tomorrow we’re bringing in 3 tons of Dry Creek Valley Grenache. We’ve submitted grape samples to ETS for smoke taint reports, but unfortunately we won’t get those results back until after we harvest it. We can’t wait any longer, because the grapes are ready now. We did small lot fermentations with the grapes at ~ 21 Brix, fermented them to dryness, and did sensory evaluation on the wine. No perceptible smokiness on the nose or palate, so we’re moving forward with the pick. Fortunately I have a strong relationship with the grower, so we have an agreement in place such that he will not charge for the grapes should smoke taint become an issue later on in the wine’s development.

I will not be making any Sonoma Coast Chardonnay nor Sonoma Coast Pinot Noir as the smoke taint reports from ETS are above the threshold at which the grower’s crop insurance will make a payment on the lost crop. So the grower is simply not selling any of these grapes.

It is still to be determined whether we make a Dry Creek Valley Counoise, and a Santa Cruz Mountain Cabernet Sauvignon. We’re gathering inputs along the way, but since these lots are later ripeners, we still have time to wait before deciding what to do with them.

All in all, I anticipate that we will be making roughly 1/2 as much wine in 2020 as we did in 2019.

What a year. Yikes!

Bret Hogan
Côte West, Oakland CA
September 9, 2020

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We had a very temperate growing season and our crop was maturing slowly and showing great quality. August 14th was the start of a long heat wave in Santa Cruz. So we began harvesting extremely early, on Sunday the 23rd of August. The same heat wave brought a dry lightning storm that started the CZU Complex fires. The fires burned most of the northern part of the mountain range and appellation. Fortunately for us, most of our vineyards are in the southern part of the AVA. It looks like we will have a good yield and great quality as long as we do not have smoke taint. A very unique and challenging harvest already and it has barely just begun.

Cole Thomas
Madson Wines, Santa Cruz CA
September 2, 2020