“It’s Raining Again!” – Harvest Roundup

For those of you regular readers of our blog posts, we thank you – and if you are one of those rare birds, we’re going to stay on the 70’s/80’s pop music trend again. As we sit down to write this post, we’re looking out the window of this first Sunday post daylight savings, and we are seeing a LOT of rain, more, we think, since March or April of this year!!

So, the match is “It’s Raining Again”, from ‘Supertramp’, this one goes back all the way to 1982. Neil thinks he may have still been in high school at the time… (eyes rolling). The ground is greedily soaking up the wet stuff, while the vineyard still has a pleasant glow, a mix of green, yellow and orange foliage… So, you artists, or photographers, come on out over the next couple of weeks if you want to take in the autumn foliage at Bluebird Hill!

The estate harvest started the morning of Saturday October 1, and ended with finality on Friday October 21. With friends, we picked about a ton of Pinot noir on the first, for rosé, the next two weekends we were in both South and North block, picking clones 115, 667, and 777 and destemming into our one-ton fermenters. Then, with a solid week of rain imminent after the 21st, somehow, we lucked out and found a commercial picking crew to come out and bail us out! They started at about 8:00 am, and with the help of our neighbor Bruce, and his tractor, we hauled out over five tons of fruit from the north block and trucked it over, bin by bin, to our processing area. We just got all the fruit tarped up Friday afternoon before a light rain came in; with a small crew, we were able to process about four tons of PN and one ton of PG the next morning.