Has a year past already? This growing season has just flown by and some optimal weather has put us close to harvest slightly sooner than expected. The bins are stacked in the staging area, the scale is calibrated and ready to go, and the crew is scheduled to kick off a night harvest of 8 tons of Mourvèdre for Tank Garage Winery to go into their fabulous Stars Like Ours rosé among other blends.
This particular harvest has us on pins and needles more so than others, anxiously wondering what the crop yield will be. This season we implemented some new farming practices in a number of the vineyard blocks including the Mourvèdre. We had planned to “one-bud” the Mourvèdre intended for red wine, and prune to the usual two buds for the Rosé. When you prune grape vines in the winter, you cut back the canes from last year and leave a number of buds on the wood remaining. These buds are where you get the first new shoots that become this year’s fruiting canes that produce the crop you plan to harvest. By pruning to one-bud rather than our usual two, we reduce the amount of fruit the vines will produce. Now logically you would assume that with half the number of buds you’d get half the amount of fruit, but in reality that’s not the case. Typically we’ve seen that one-budding has typically reduced the crop by around a third. “How can this be,” you may ask? Well, the vine put more energy into the remaining fruit, producing larger higher quality clusters. The reason you prune to one-bud for red grapes is that it allows the vine to put more energy into ripening each cluster, ideally resulting in more harvestable and increased quality. Because rosé is harvested much less ripe (anywhere from 18 – 20 Brix versus a red wine which usually will harvest at 24-27 Brix) two buds is more efficient and productive.
Unfortunately, due to some confusion we ended up with one-bud pruning across the board, leaving us wondering if we’ll have enough fruit to satisfy all our orders. Tonight will be the test. Depending upon how much fruit comes out of Block C-1 we’ll know how much to expect from the other vineyard block C-2. Last year C-1 produced over 9 tons of fruit, but that was with two buds and 2018 was a powerhouse growing season. 2019 was a good growing season but a bit cooler and wetter in the spring so the crop isn’t as large.
We will find out tonight, as we anxiously anticipate the harvest.
Cheers.
