As I sat soaking my weary bones in a tub of hot water last night I had several reflections about this year’s vintage.  First, I am wondering how long will it take before hands no longer look like they belong to a gorilla and secondly, I feel that that I should apologize for my lack of updates this vintage on the blog.  I had a perfect conceptual plan in place for a calm and well paced vintage which I managed to keep together for nearly a whole week.  After that point, the “*%$ hit the fan” when Mother Nature decided to ripen everything in the vineyard all at once and the calm paced vintage became a high paced crush marathon of 14-16 hour days. Hence my lack of updates on the blog.

Vintage lasted a couple of weeks longer than last year and was 48 days in length from start to finish on the crush pad (last year was only 31 days).  Our yields were up on our whites and about on average for our reds.  The final vintage tally puts us at approximately 93 T which is about 20% higher than last year’s production.

I am starting to truly believe in the global warming issues and Vintage 2009 will go down in the record books as one of many extremes.  After a bitterly cold winter in 2008, and a cool spring in 2009, (which already had me wondering about the year to come), we experienced a nearly perfect Okanagan summer with record breaking warm weather in September which prompted an early harvest of some of our grape varieties by as much as 2-3 weeks earlier than in previous years.  October’s warm fall days had it looking to be a year in which we would complete vintage while wearing only shorts and t-shirts but then we were hit hard with yet another extreme  weather occurrence.

Shorts in October

T-shirts in October

Shirtless in October

Viognier harvested 3 weeks early

It was back to reality when an abnormally early freeze and record low temperatures (as low as -11 C) hit on the Thanksgiving weekend and in that instance, the vine shut down and the grape growing season was finished for the year.

Lignified stems on Grenache clusters

Grenache crush

For the most part, thanks to our careful vineyard practices, our grapes were either already harvested or they were ready to be harvested when this freak weather occurred and it will be insignificant to the overall quality of our wines.  That being said, I know that there are other wineries out there that have faced great challenges as their fruit was (and in some cases, still is) hanging on the vines and much of it is not ripe.

The 2009 Okanagan Fall  Wine Festival is always a welcome distraction from the daily grind of vintage and I am proud to say that our 2008 Sauvignon Blanc/Semillon was awarded a gold medal at the Festival.  This increases it’s medal tally to 2 gold medals this year and if you haven’t tried it yet, don’t wait too long as it won’t be around the wine shop for long.  Our Fall Festival event “You say Shiraz, We say Syrah” tasting was well attended and I was very pleased with the responses from the participants about the release of our 2008 Syrah. The wine is now available from our wine shop or through our website.  I also had the opportunity to enjoy an evening at Villa Rosa (lamb shanks from heaven) during our annual winemaker’s dinner.  It was great to meet with many new faces and to get reacquainted with the ones that have been seeing from past winery functions.

Syrah/Shiraz tasting

I hope that you enjoy the photos from all of the happenings from the past few weeks.

The end of the rainbow is at SHV

If food is the body of good living, wine is the soul. - Clifton Fadiman

Dwight

We awoke to yet another stunning sunshine filled day and it couldn’t have been better for harvesting our SHV Chardonnay.  The flavour profiles are so perfect that most of the this years fruit is destine for a premium barrel fermented wine.  Here are a few photos of the pick.

Perfectly ripe Chardonnay

A perfect Indian Summer day at SHV

Pressed Juice chilling out and settling in tank

“In wine one beholds the heart of another”

Dwight