We got up at 5 AM today to drive up to Fallbrook to harvest syrah at Live Oak Vineyard.  The weather has actually been very nice, it was a nice brisk morning drive up.  We had several friends meeting us there to help out with harvest.

We did not have any major heat waves like last year, and the grapes looked and tasted fantastic!  First we pulled off all of the bird netting, which is put on just after veraison starts to keep the birds from feasting on the grapes before we can get to them.  Then, we started clipping the big, juicy clusters off of the vines.

Mike Hoffman has two parts of the vineyard, a lower vineyard and a vineyard up on the hill.  It was very interesting that the lower vineyard had a much higher yield, and the grapes in the two vineyards really tasted different; the lower vineyard was more fruit-forward, whereas the upper vineyard was much spicier.

Bringing down the grapes from the upper vineyard for crush

Final harvest, ready to crush

This year it took us about an hour to harvest all of the grapes, and in the end we had about 1000 lbs (half ton).  Paul and I are taking half of the harvest to make at his new place, and the Hoffmans will keep the other half this year — last year we ended up taking all of their beautiful grapes, and none of us wanted that to happen again!

We loaded the grapes into the crusher/destemmer:

We  did mix a little of both vineyards for each of our portions, we decided it would be too complicated to keep them separate.  The grapes were a perfect 24 brix.  When we were finally done and the grapes were safe in their primary fermentors with dry ice and potassium metabisulfite, we feasted!  Of course, we started by tasting the 2009 vintage of the syrah harvested from this vineyard.  I bottled one bottle a month ago in anticipation of this year’s harvest.

2010 Harvest Crew

It was exceptional, a big, bold fruit-forward wine with good spice and full mouthfeel.  Everyone was very impressed with the wine, and we are all looking forward to the 2010 vintage, especially since we’ll have much more — we only harvested 256 lbs last year, with a final volume of 11 gallons of finished wine!

After our picnic with homemade cheeses and yummy pasta, we loaded the grapes into the truck and took it all back to Paul’s new winery.  He will pitch “syrah” strain of yeast into ours, and Mike will be using a new strain, “CLOS”.  We plan to put both through malolactic fermentation, then we will put ours into a Flextank with French oak.  The latter is based on the flavor profile of the 2009 vintage, and since it worked out so well with just French oak we don’t want to change that part of the equation.  We’re definitely looking forward to seeing how this vintage shapes up, but it’s already off to a great start!  Thanks again to everyone that came out to help.