1859 Sept | Oct 2012_opt

ine Crush
INEMAKERS WERE PACING THE VINES, checking the weather
reports constantly, hoping sunshine would prevail for a spell—just
long enough to goose the sugar level in this Pinot noir harvest. At
Vista Hills Vineyard, winemaker Dave Petterson was beyond his
comfort zone. It was already weeks beyond a typical harvest date
and yet the crop hung in the cool fall rain and fog.
If he waited much longer to pull the grapes, frost would kill them.
If he picked them now, they could miss a couple of crucial days of
sun. It was nearly November. This multi-million-dollar crop dripped with the heightened
possibility of failure.
It wasn’t just Petterson and fellow-wine growers in the Willamette Valley feeling the
anxiety. Vineyards from Washington down through Northern California were three to
four weeks late in a growing season that, at least in the Willamette Valley, is planned
around 120 frost-free days.
“It was the most difficult harvest I’ve encountered,” says Gary Horner, Erath Vineyards’
winemaker for nearly twenty-five years. “We were looking for answers. … Quite
frankly what I saw coming down the track was a freight train.”
Through September and October, an anxious waiting game began across Oregon’s
850 vineyards and 20,000 acres of grapes. Sugar levels remained stubbornly low. “It
was crazy how not busy we were,” Petterson says.
At Adelsheim Vineyard, interns from abroad came on work visas to learn the winemaking
business during a harvest. Their visas expired, and they left receiving little
more than learning patience and how to clean idle implements.
Weather forecasters, meanwhile, were having one of their busiest years. The whole
agriculture industry in the Pacific Northwest and Northern California—growers of
hay, wheat, hops, apples, pears—was bemused. “We kept updating the weather reports
daily,” says Adelsheim winemaker, Dave Paige. “I’m surprised we didn’t crash the
Weather.com site with all the Oregon winemakers that year.”
the
process
pick
transport
to facility
sort +
de-stem
6 1859 oregon's mAgAzine SEPT OCT 2012