Wednesday, September 16, 2009

Harvest 2009!


Harvest 2009 has begun as of today! The weather in Walla Walla has been warm the last few days, with the nights staying pretty warm as well, and the result is that the grapes are ready. As is tradition at Pepper Bridge, the staff toasted the 2009 vintage with glasses of Champagne for luck. We brought in about 10 tons of Merlot from our Seven Hills Vineyard this morning to kick off the harvest. The Merlot looks and tastes good so far, with very small berries and nice clusters. If the weather continues to stay warm, harvest could roll into full swing very quickly. Jean-François has been in the vineyards each morning this week at 6:00 a.m., checking the Brix level of the grapes. According to him, the sugar levels in all the grapes, including all the varietals that we use at Pepper Bridge, are getting close where he wants them. This means that the next couple of weeks could be a flurry of activity here at the winery, and the wine making team is all set to go. We have a new shaker-sorter table this year and it got its first use today. The table is used for quality control of the grapes. All of the grapes at Pepper Bridge are hand-picked, but we want to make sure that only the best grapes end up in the tank. We hand sort the grape clusters as they vibrate down the table before they are destemmed. Once the grapes have passed through the destemmer, they fall onto a second sorting table. This gives us one more opportunity to sort out unwanted grapes and stems. Today we also discovered that this new attachment also sorts out all of the bugs that happen to be in the grapes like lady bugs and bees. Definitely stuff that we don't want ending up in the tank with the grapes. It is an exciting new tool for the wine-making team and it should lead to even better Pepper Bridge wines.

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