09 september – 2015 harvest day 6

10.9.2015billn

A late-ish finish yesterday, so only chance to type this the day after.

Despite our expectations of a very late finish, it was only a late finish – 21h30. We found a couple of libations to relax afterwards! The reason for the earlier than expected finish is the pinot yield. Before harvesting, looking at the vines it seemed to all the growers (and observers!) that yields would not be massive, but would be okay – though still very low in areas which were 3x hailed as those vines haven’t fully recovered – but reality is different. Very common are yields of only 2/3rds what people expected – it’s not really down to berry size as the average is not so small, and millerandes are much less common this year – there’s some head-scratching from producers.

We had a big new contract this year for fruit for bourgogne rouge, I won’t say where from, but what a coup. This fruit looked better than the vast majority of grapes that ever pass along the triage table – a big round of applause for this grower! – and I certainly include grand crus in that statement. Simply a pleasure to triage: no oïdium, very, very little rot, very little dried berries – I’ll say it again, a pleasure.

Our Vosne-Romanée looked similarly great in the cases as it waited for triage, but on the table we had to deal with quite a lot of oïdium – it’s insidious and very hard to triage as it creeps into parts of bunches but (seemingly!) not the rest of the bunch – or it simply frizzles whole bunches. The clusters look like they’ve been breathed-on by death-eaters. I eat plenty of grapes along the way, but not so much when this is on the table. Still some parts of this were fine and we selected about 4 or 5 cases of good-looking whole-clusters for the fermentation.

Clean-up expedited and it’s only 21h30 – what unexpected fortune – though only because we had fewer cases of fruit than were expected!
 

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