October 15, 2007
Whew – all the fruit is in the barn! We brought in all the remaining parcels at Momtazi and Zenith vineyards on Friday, Saturday and Sunday, and our 2007 harvest is now done. It’s always a great feeling to have all of the vintage in house, until you look in the winery and realize we have 64 separate fermentations to deal with now! We are packed to the gills in there, and have definitely maxed-out the capacity of our new facility. (It’s some kind of law, isn’t it – that you will always expand to fill whatever space you’ve got?) Kelley & the crew are doing a great job staying on top of it all. It’s quite an exercise in logistics, with a number of fermentations now finished and needing to be drained and pressed, others soaking and waiting to get started, and others mid-ferment and needing constant monitoring and attention.
The good news is that we’re going to have some really nice wines when all is said and done. Alcohol levels should be in the 13-13.5% range across the board, which we feel is the sweet-spot for our style. The native-yeast ferments have been behaving very nicely, and the early lots from Maresh, Ribbon Ridge and Shea are showing signs of being outstanding at this point.
Sadly, the press will probably seize on the rain we had off and on during harvest, and use that to cast a negative pall over the vintage. Then, when the wines come out in 18 months-2 years from now, they’ll remind everyone again that it was a “weak” year. There certainly won’t be any of the 15-16% alcohol big-boy pinots that much of the press seems to love, so it can’t be agood vintage, right?
Did the rain affect the vintage? Absolutely. The rain and cool weather the last couple of weeks slowed down ripening, created varying amounts of rot at different sites, and probably diluted flavors – all site-specific and dependant on when you picked. Will the wines be tremendous across the board? No. Will there be some excellent wines from 2007 in the Willamette Valley? Absolutely. Only time will tell the complete story, but as always it will be a complex story with a thousand different facets, not easily summed up as simply “good” or “bad”. Rating a vintage can only be the broadest of generalizations at best, with the possible exceptions of those rare vintages like 2005 Burgundy or 2002 Oregon, when virtually everyone made excellent wine. At the end of the day, the old adage remains true – there are no great wines (or vintages), only great bottles…
