Harvest 2013 - Day 1

It has begun!  Today we kicked off our 16^th harvest at James Arthur Vineyards  by crushing about 13 tons of Edelweiss grapes from 3 different growers.  Before we pick any grape, we look at the field brix (sugar level), the pH and the acid in the grape.  All the growers we had in today were ready.  We’ll bring in 4 more growers tomorrow, and finish up with the rest of our growers next week/weekend.  This has been an interesting year, in that because of the cooler, wet spring, everything bloomed out a little later than normal, which means we started harvest just a hair later than we usually do.  Also, although 2 of the growers are less than a mile away, our grapes here at JAV aren’t quite ready, which means we’ll be starting our harvest during the middle of next week.  Usually we use a lot of high school kids for picking, and since school has already started in Lincoln and the surrounding area, it could be interesting in how many pickers we’ll get.  We’ve already decided that we’ll do an evening pick next Thursday, which is something we’ve never done here at JAV.

The crush crew today consisted of myself, my assistant winemaker Justin, our longtime employee and friend Al, and my son Beau…of 2 Brothers fame.  The weather was perfect for picking and crushing, lots of clouds and mild temps, makes life a lot easier on all of us, and especially the grapes.  So far, the yields are a little higher than we estimated, so it looks like it’s going to be a bumper crop of Edelweiss!  We also broke out the new Europress this afternoon…ran like a champ!  Took a little reconfiguring, but it will make us even more efficient on these long harvest days!

Hopefully the rest of harvest will go as smooth as today…we’ll keep you posted!

Just a Little Recap - Harvest 2012

We have barely yet to begin our growing season, but preparing for it brings an excitement and anticipation for summer's end...when it will, once again, be time for harvest.  Here's a really nice video from last year's harvest - enjoy!

Harvest 2012

Our 2012 Harvest season kind of snuck up on us, as we started picking about 3 weeks earlier than normal this year. We actually started bringing grapes in on August 1^st, as our Edelweiss was more than ready. That is the earliest we have ever started picking, and we probably could have started even a few days earlier, which would have been crazy to start in July! The cool thing about Edelweiss is that it has a very fragrant aroma that wafts through the vineyards when it becomes ripe, and it was very evident the days before we picked.

The other unusual thing I noticed, was that most times when we hit the 95+ mark in heat, is that most plants will shut down and not continue do produce. With grapes, we like to see those nice warm days and cool nights in order to bring our sugar content up, but usually the plants won’t move as quick when it gets as hot as it has been. However, the vines seemed to thrive in this hot weather and have reached sugar levels that I haven’t experienced here in Nebraska before. In all the other years we’ve harvested grapes (and this will be our 16^th year of harvest at JAV), we’ve been able to push certain varieties along but they seem to plateau at a certain brix (the sugars in the grape) and we go ahead and pick them as long as the pH and acids all fall in line. This year the sugars just kept climbing. LaCrosse has been a perfect example. In most years, I’m happy when we can hit 17 or 18 brix. This year, we harvested our LaCrosse here at JAV at 23 brix. That’s quite a bit of difference.

What I’m finding is that we have some very sweet and intense flavors to work with this year, because I believe the grapes are feeling some stress from the weather conditions we’ve experienced. However, because of the lack of rain, our yields have been down. The grapes just aren’t as plump as they normally are. Of course, every year is a bit different and time will tell as to how this harvest will shape up, but the signs are encouraging that we should have some very nice wines from the 2012 vintage.

We wrapped most of the harvest up by September 1st…which is usually when we’re just in the full swing of things!  I’ve come to believe that in growing grapes, the abnormal is normal when we start talking about harvest!