Vineyard Harvest Year 6 | 2020

Less than a month and a half from putting up the bird netting and most of the grapes were ready to harvest!

Let's take a look at how effective the bird netting was this year. There was one noticeable spot on the Chardonnay vine next to the edge of the netting that had some apparent bird damage. But other than losing 1 or 2 clusters, the rest of the grapes remained intact! Much better than the paper bag method!

Let me tell you though, navigating the vineyard with all this bird netting is not as easy as it used to be. I had to get really flexible to get from plant to plant. My hat kept getting caught on top of the netting so I had to take it off!

Looking through the vineyard, there were a ton of clusters of both colors! Tons of red and white grapes!

The best showing from any of the plants had to be the Palomino vine. This white grape produced the biggest grapes and the most clusters of any plant from any of the past vineyard harvests (previous bests: Syrah 2017, Symphony 2018)

The Chardonnay vine, despite taking some bird damage, had a lot of remaining clusters. I tasted the symphony in the back, but those were not ready to harvest today.

For the red grapes, the Pinot Noir and Cabernet Sauvignon contributed the most to today's harvest. I also harvested a few clusters from the Tempranillo vine. I guess the Spanish grapes really like this climate.

Remaining for the red grapes on the vine are the Syrah and Zinfandel grapes. Both Zinfandel plants I've got have finally started producing, and they are producing a lot of grapes!

This has to be the best year of the vineyard so far, and I'm not even done harvesting. The weights of all the clusters so far is ~2 lbs for the white grapes, and ~1.5 lbs for the red grapes. That's enough of both to make multiple estate blends! Check back later to see how crushing these grapes went.

Compare to Last Year's Harvest (2019)

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