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Another hot year blesses the Pacific NW vineyards.  In 2015 the nice weather started even earlier than in the past 3 years.  This led to an early and very healthy bud break and fruit set that resulted in some of the largest and plentiful Pinot noir clusters.   All signs pointed to an early harvest but the grape growers truly faced uncharted waters.  In June, our vineyard manager suggested that some of the fruit in the valley might even be harvested in August this year.  This is something we certainly did not want to see happen.  So what could we do to slow the ripening down. We employed several strategies to reduce the nutrients that were available to the vines. ...

Conditions in the Willamette Valley were more like the Umpqua Valley with the Growing Degree Days (GDD) hitting ~ 2575 at harvest on September 27th.  Typically, for most of the previous years we would not reach 2100 GDD by this time. Harvest was very smooth this year with great weather up to the day we planned on harvesting.  We could have hung longer but the grapes were at the optimum brix and the acid was still bright.  We learned that in a lot of vineyards the acid levels dropped very rapidly this year – probably due to the hotter summer.  Acid is such a critical balancing component in Pinot noir that we did not want to lose that bright component...

A challenging and exciting vintage The second vintage at The Potter’s Vineyard started with some excellent weather for growing grapes. The first quarter of the year was drier than normal making it easier to get into the field and give the vines a good start. The mildew that often comes that time of year was also much less of a challenge. The nice weather continued and created one of the driest springs on record. A ‘normal’ dry summer continued leaving us with growing degree-days quite a bit ahead of normal. We reached bud break, bloom, and fruit set earlier than is typical most years. There was a bit of hail during bloom that created an incomplete fruit set so the...

We can’t remember a better harvest and vintage since we started in the Oregon wine industry. The picking window was wide open and the flavor development and sugars were right on target with a “normal” Oregon harvest date, the first or second week of October. We leisurely applied the nets but the bird pressure was light and we didn’t feel the need to panic like the previous two seasons.The warm Indian Summer was spectacular, not only for grape growers, but for all Oregonians it was a well deserved span of dry warm days in September and a gentle start to October and the threat of rain was not hanging over our heads. What a gift to boast of ripe, clean...