Tag:

harvest

Chile Harvest Report 2016

by AB July 15, 2016

Written for Decanter

April showers hit the Chile 2016 vintage, with some producers describing conditions as more like those on France’s Atlantic coast and overall production down by a fifth versus 2015.

With wine regions spanning over 1000km, the Chile 2016 vintage was always going to have regional variation. But, most areas experienced a cooler and wetter year, with some reporting high humidity. This resulted in lighter wines and a 20% drop in production versus 2015.

Read the full report on Decanter.com

El Nino hampers Argentina’s 2016 harvests

by AB July 15, 2016

Written for Decanter

The El Niño weather cycle saw Argentina report its worst pre-harvest grape losses since 1957, with production in 2016 expected to be 27% smaller than 2015 across the country and 39% down in Mendoza. A cool and wet spring set the harvest back by a month.

April was a wash out with 400% more rainfall than usual over 15 days complicating harvest times and adding botrytis to the list of problems alongside powdery and downy mildew.

Read the full article on Decanter.com

South Africa Vintage Report 2015

by AB June 1, 2015

Some claim it is one of South Africa’s best vintages for decades, but that doesn’t mean it was without drama.

Written for Wine-Searcher

So, how was the 2015 harvest in South Africa?

“Like a rat up a drainpipe being pursued by a Cape cobra,” was the analysis of Fledge & Company’s Leon Coetzee. “It was an incredibly early harvest. Less than average winter rainfall, scant spring rains, good heat and a few real hot spells meant that you had to be in the vineyards even more than usual and have growers who know their vines really well, as well as not getting too spooked too early,” Coetzee commented in general about the 18 sites around the Cape that Fledge vinifies.

Speed was of the essence for producers this year, with the harvest running between a week and a month early in places. The early and dry growing season combined with a handful of heat waves (including the hottest day on record for more than a century) led to one of the earliest harvests on the books in South Africa.

It was a short Christmas holiday period for South African winemakers, who had to be harvesting just a few days into January as the harvest came fast and furiously. Picking times and getting (and fitting) all the grapes into the winery became the important balancing act. For those who could keep all their balls in the air at once, 2015 is set to be one of the best harvests on record…

Read the full report at Wine-Searcher

Argentina Vintage Report 2015

by AB June 1, 2015

It’s been a tricky harvest for much of Argentina, with yet another warm and wet vintage that will separate the good winemakers from the inexperienced.

Written for Wine-Searcher

Argentina received the tail-end of Chile’s odd climatic year. In the south, the Patagonian region of Chubut had to pick earlier than planned in order to avoid ash fall from Chile’s volcanic explosion damaging the crops. “Normally in the region, Merlot is harvested between May 2-5, but we had to pick it early because of the bad predictions of ash settling,” said Dario Gonzalez, a consultant in the region.

In Mendoza, the heartland of Argentine wine, the harvest was unusually wet and warm. Many producers, who are not used to dealing with humid conditions in its normally dry climate, lost large quantities of fruit to adverse conditions. “This harvest was a very strange one,” commented Leo Erazu, winemaker for Altos Las Hormigas. “It started really warm for two months, and then the constant rainy periods affected some areas very badly, and strong hailstorms damaged a lot of hectares. Rot attacks were very common from March onwards; downy mildew attacks were widespread in all the Pedriel and Agrelo areas. The hail badly affected some regions such as El Peral in Tupungato, some vineyards lost up to the 50 percent of the yield … Harvest time was very important this year. Because of the human scale of our project we still managed to taste every block of grapes, and harvested almost everything before the rain came.”

The challenge this year was on getting the timing right; dodging the rains and coping with the early harvest. “The spring buds arrived 20 days earlier than a normal year,” said winemaker Matias Michelini, winemaker for Passionate Wines, Zorzal and Sophenia in the Uco Valley, where he is always one of the first to harvest. “It has been one of the shortest harvests I remember…”

Read the full report at Wine-Searcher

Chile Vintage Report 2015

by AB June 1, 2015

Chile has had a pretty wild ride this year, marked by floods and volcanic eruptions. The resulting wines will be mixed but the warm season looks promising for Mediterranean varieties.

Starting in the north of the country, a hot and very dry growing season pushed harvest times forward by a couple weeks. “We have had an early harvest this year with big bunches and lots of fruit,” said Emily Faulconer, winemaker at Viñedos Alcohuaz in Elqui. “The green harvest was very important this year” to restrict yields and allow fruit to ripen.

For all the dry conditions during the majority of the year, Mother Nature certainly made up for it on March 25; a freak rainfall dumped the equivalent of seven years’ worth of the region’s rainfall in less than 12 hours, reaching parts of the Atacama desert that hadn’t seen rain for centuries. Treacherous mud avalanches were fatal, although only affected minor vineyard plantations in Chanaral. In Limari, where harvest was halted for a few days until conditions dried up, the rain was a blessing in disguise for an otherwise parched region.

Further down the coast, in Casablanca, the hot year fanned a bush fire between the wine region and port city Valparaiso but fortunately vineyards were left unscathed. “2015 was a special harvest because we had a warm summer and autumn, with lower rainfall than the previous year,” commented Felipe Garcia from Garcia-Schwaderer. “We had a normal yield, but an early increase of sugar concentration. For that reason we picked some fruit without full ripening, [to maintain acidity].”

It was a battle for acidity across the Central Valley with a hotter harvest in most places, although rainfall mid-harvest in March proved a relief for some producers…

Read the full report on Wine-Searcher.com

South America 2014 vintage report

by AB June 27, 2014

Written for Wine-Searcher Rainclouds were common over Mendoza during the 2014 vintage

The grapes of the 2014 vintage in the Southern Hemisphere are safely in wineries and, while the weather has not been kind to many regions, overall the quality looks good.

Argentina

For a land that is normally blessed with more than 330 days a year of sunshine, the country’s major wine-producing region Mendoza suffered an unusually wet harvest in 2014.

After a record-breaking heat wave early in the season, the year’s entire annual average rainfall fell in just three weeks during the Argentinean summer. As a result, many growers had to do more vineyard work than normal in order to limit the botrytis risk.

The harvest was also compressed into a few short weeks, causing more headaches for wine producers.

“It has been a different vintage,” says Pablo Martorell, head winemaker at The Vines of Mendoza. “In December we had record high temperatures [compared with] the past 30 years. Then we had two rainy months. Therefore we have experienced more challenges than normal. For the majority of the reds, ripeness occurred very close together, creating a need for additional logistical planning during harvest.”

Susana Balbo, president of Dominio del Plata in Mendoza warned that this was not a year for leaving the fruit out in the vineyard to gain extra ripeness. “In a year like this, long hang times don’t work – there is a dilution effect on the quality.”

The silver lining to Chile’s 2014 harvest

by AB June 27, 2014

Written for Wines of Chile

While the year certainly started on a hard note for Chile with an unexpected and ferocious frost across many of the wine regions, nine months later the wine that has made its way into the wineries is looking promising for a high quality vintage.

The difficult start to the vintage was because of a widespread couple days of frost in mid-September which reduced production by between 10 and 70% (depending on variety, vineyard and winery). It can be said that every cloud has a silver lining though, as – according to many winemakers – these low yielding vines produced more concentrated grapes that benefited from a steady ripening season.

“This year has been very good in terms of quality, as some of the varieties already had a reduction in yields because of the spring frosts,” Julio Bastias, winemaker at Matetic in San Antonio and Casablanca said. “Because of this we’ve had very good concentration and complexity in the wines.”

Most of Chile was favoured with good climatic conditions for a long and dry ripening season. “Although volumes are lower than historically, I think that because we are facing a smaller crop and enjoying outstanding climate, we will have an excellent quality in our 2014 wines,” said owner and winemaker Aurelio Montes from Montes winery with vineyards all across the country.

While the lack of rain has been good news for ripening, some producers – especially in the north – have their fingers crossed this winter for a good snowfall in the Andes so that water resources are replenished for next year. “Climate conditions here in Elqui were very nice as usual,” commented Giorgio Flessati, Head Winemaker at Viña Mayu. “The production is a bit lower than 2013 vintage but we didn’t suffer frost effects, only smaller bunches. The only big worry that we have is the water: we had just two days with a bit of rain in the last 18 months.”

Young Wine Writer of Year Award 2012: Runner Up

by AB December 26, 2012

My entry to the Young Wine Writer of the Year Award (UK) which placed as Runner Up.

The True Face of Harvest

Carlos wiped the dripping sweat from his brow. His stout index finger brushed his right eye, and the vinegar he had doused on it stung the crease of his eyelid. He winced and rubbed his grimy shirt against his damp forehead, cursing the wasp that stung him an hour before.

It was 10.30am on a mid March morning in Mendoza, and already 38 degrees centigrade. They still had at least three hours of picking to do. At the very thought of it, Carlos’s neck exuded more drops of salty sweat down his spine.

The cuadrillero [leader of the grape pickers] walked past him and rasped a brash cough in his direction – a reminder that he needed to pick up the pace. Carlos had been a grape picker for 36 years, but now at 46 he was starting to slow down a bit. He felt a pang of jealousy at the half dozen extra chips the younger pickers were collecting by the end of each day.

As he slid his hand behind the next bunch of grapes he felt for the stalk, used the knife to sear into the edge of it and tore it off as quickly as he could, pulling a few leaves and the grape cluster into the bucket. The leaves crunched and disintegrated as he pulled them back out. He knew the cuadrillero wouldn’t accept any more leaves in his bucket, and he was already on tender hooks after getting caught by the authorities last week. That had been a bad day… Carlos blushed at the memory.