Harvest Insights: Experts Chat on 2024 Harvest
Watch the recorded Harvest 2024 Discussion with Growers Adam Franscioni and Steve McIntyre and Winemaker Adam Lee
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Read the Harvest 2024 Zoom Update Transcript
Adam Franscioni:
I am Adam Franscioni and I am on the farming and production side.
Adam Lee:
Hey, everyone, I'm Adam Lee. I have been working with grapes in the Santa Lucia Highlands since 1997. I used to own a winery called Siduri Wines, which I sold to Jackson Family Wines about nine years ago. I now have Clarice Wine Company, where I get fruit from the Garys' and Rosella's Vineyards. I'm also the consulting winemaker for Rombauer Wines on their Pinot Noir, which means I get fruit throughout the Santa Lucia Highlands, from the northern end down to the southern end.
Steve McIntyre:
Thank you, Gwen. Yes, I'm Steve McIntyre, with McIntyre Vineyards. We’ve been in the Santa Lucia Highlands since 1987 when we purchased the vineyard. We’re currently farming our own estate vineyard, as well as the La Playa Vineyard, which is next door. Looking forward to the discussion today, and it’s great to be kicking off harvest this early compared to last year.
Moderator:
Wonderful. It’s great to have all of you. Thank you, everyone, for joining. I want to start with just a little grounder. Let’s remind ourselves where we are. We have some new people joining us, so let’s start with where we are. We’ve got this great little fly-in on Google Earth to remind us where the Santa Lucia Highlands are, smack dab here just south of Monterey Bay.
This is a great look for us to really get a bearing of where we are. So, you see down there, south of Monterey Bay, that really important influence for the Santa Lucia Highlands creates those strong daily winds that have such an important impact on the grapes—not just how they grow, but also the flavor of the wines that you love.
You can see the fly-in here taking a view south from Monterey Bay. All that really, really cold water creates this ocean effect. If you went past Soledad, you'd see Paso Robles way down the valley. When it heats up down there, it pulls all that cold, cold wind from Monterey Bay down through the Santa Lucia Highlands.
This gives you a great view of the vineyards with the Big Sur Coast Pacific Ocean in the back. It also gives you a look at the vineyards from the northern end of the SLH, where the vineyards are sort of sloping up towards the hillside. In the middle, things start to change a little bit as we head southward, and you really start to see these canyons and sort of mesas, these little fingers—the vineyards sitting on the top of a little plateau with an arroyo in between.
And of course, as we travel from north to south in the Santa Lucia Highlands, we gain maybe about 10 degrees of temperature from the north to the south as well. So, just a little reminder, there is the Santa Lucia Highlands for you.
I also wanted to give a quick update. We have some news from the actual kickoff of harvest. This happened last week. Our friends over at Caraccioli Cellars started with their first pick on August 14th. I'm going to pull up a couple of pictures here. This was beautiful fruit from Escolle Vineyard. On August 14th, they took in about four rows of Pinot Noir.
Two days later, our friends over at Chalone Vineyard, Joan and Penny Allred, started picking Chardonnay and a little bit of Pinot Noir as well. So, you can see things are just looking beautiful out there. We’ll get back to a few more images of harvest later. Adam Lee's got some images fresh from this morning.
Now, I wanted to dive in and talk about the season and what's been happening in the vineyards since we last spoke to many of you who joined our last harvest Zoom, which was at the end of May.
Adam Franscioni:
Yeah, it’s been busy. We got about 15 inches of rain this winter and spring, and on average, we're about 12 to 14 inches. So, anytime we're over our average, we’re pretty happy with it. We have very low rainfall here in this appellation, but our vines manage it, and they do well with it.
So, we've been able to hedge this year. The canopies are really full, and we had a little bit of a warmer summer, I'd say, than normal. But the past month has just been classic SLH—we’ve had morning fog and then these winds. Right now, the winds actually started really early today, like by 8 AM they were already going.
I’d say the last month has been a real nice reprieve from some of the summer months that we had before that. We started veraison probably in the last week of July, and now we’re just kind of gearing up for what's about to come.
Moderator:
That's great. Adam Lee, what are you seeing out there since May?
Adam Lee:
Yeah, it's been really interesting to see the changes over the last month or so that Adam was talking about. I source grapes not just from the Santa Lucia Highlands but also from up here in Sonoma County, where I live. Up until about two or three weeks ago, I would have sworn that Sonoma County was behind the San Lucia Highlands. San Lucia had a somewhat warmer summer, and we had a couple of big heat spikes up in Sonoma County, but not the continual warmth that was kind of happening in San Lucia. Now, things have reversed within a fairly short period. As Adam said, San Lucia has reverted to normal, and it's slowed things down a good bit, while Sonoma County is now moving ahead a bit more. So it's kind of reverting to normal.
I've also noticed that when we were going through, one of the things we didn't quite have yet last time was cluster counts. We were counting how many clusters were out there and noticed there were fewer clusters than normal. That trend certainly continues in most places. However, we had ideal weather during flowering and set, absolutely fantastic weather, which has led to clusters that weigh more. They seem to be a bit tighter and have more weight. We're not going to be completely sure about the yields until we actually pick some vineyards. Sometimes it's hard to base your estimates on cluster weight alone. You just have to count the number of clusters and do some basic math. For example, if you have a cluster that weighs 80 grams, but your average cluster weighs 90 grams that year, that 10-gram difference doesn’t seem like much on a single cluster basis. But when you do the math across the vineyard, that extra 10 grams per cluster is a huge amount of extra fruit. So, I’m not positive we know exactly how much we're going to have until harvest.
Lastly, because the weather was so ideal during veraison and when things were coloring up, there hasn't been a lot of need to thin the fruit. We haven't really needed to put much fruit on the ground. We have done some thinning, but often you put down fruit that's not coloring up at the same rate as others, especially if you had a long flowering season. We haven't had that issue this year, so there’s not a huge need to drop large amounts of fruit on the ground. Speaking of fruit on the ground, here are some photos you sent us this morning. Let’s talk about what we’re seeing here.
Moderator:
Let me see if I can get to the next one.
Adam Lee:
It’s funny, but I was so excited today after going into the vineyards. Walking through, it’s like being a kid all over again. You’re just delighted when you see fruit like this, where you get some dappled sunlight in, but it’s not fully exposed. The clusters are hanging free, so there’s no cluster on top of another. That’s where you can have problems with botrytis, especially with the fog, but we don't have any of that this year. The fruit seems to be incredibly well spaced out, probably because we have fewer clusters. Everything is set for the potential to be an incredible harvest and growing season. We did find a bird’s nest today, and mama bird wasn’t too thrilled as we walked past, but it was a neat discovery.
Now, as we go along, we’re checking numbers—sugars, acids, and all of that—but one of the most important things we check is the browning of seeds. As you can see, we’re not there yet. We’re not ready to pick Pinot Noir just yet. The seeds are still green, with a bit of what I call "snot" around them, though I'm sure Steve or Adam, who know viticulture better than I do, have a more technical term for it. That snot will dry up and go away, and the seeds will turn brown. That’s one of the signs we look for to determine if the clusters are mature and ready for harvest. So, we still have some time before we get there.
Moderator:
Great, thank you. Steve, what about you and your team? Tell me what you've seen this summer. We've had veraison, and we definitely had a few warm spells. I don’t ever remember it being that hot during our sommelier tour.
Steve McIntyre:
Yeah, it’s been an ideal growing season, despite the heat, thanks to our maritime influence. We often get a hot spell or a heat dome in the fall with an offshore flow from a high-pressure system, usually sitting over the Great Basin. This results in Southern California getting the east winds, the Santa Ana winds. When that happens, our vineyards near the coast can get quite warm. But this year, the maritime influence was so strong that it could be 65 degrees in Castroville and 112 in King City, which are only 49 miles apart. So, our vineyards in the Highlands were warm but comfortable, and it wasn’t a problem.
Our vineyard doesn't have the ideal row direction because it’s left over from when the vines were planted in 1972, and we still have some own-rooted vines. Right now, we're putting shade cloth on the afternoon sun side of those vines because they’re getting more heat and sunlight than we’d like, especially as the sun angle lowers in the sky heading into fall. That shade cloth—an 18-inch panel on one side of the vine, with bird netting on the other—can protect against a low high-pressure system in the Great Basin that might cause heat, like in 2017, when we saw 117 degrees in our vineyard for two days during Labor Day. It's a precautionary measure, and with climate change, we’re seeing more of that in grape-growing areas, particularly in the Upper Valley this year. So, that’s one thing we’re doing right now.
Moderator:
Thank you. The next thing I want to discuss is what’s happening behind the scenes right now. Adam Franscioni is going to give us a look at what’s actually happening as a grower who sells fruit to various folks. Adam, what are you doing on a day-to-day basis as you wait for the pick?
Adam Franscioni (Speaker 4):
Right now, we also farm other crops, so we harvested some avocados the other day. But at this moment, it’s really the calm before the storm. We’re doing things like Steve mentioned, such as bird netting. As Gary Pisoni famously said, "If you eat my birds, we’ll all eat you." Driving through the ranches, you see birds flocking out. They only come out when everything’s in veraison because, before that, the grapes are too acidic and hard, and the birds don’t like them. When the sugar starts accumulating in the clusters, that’s when they show up. In some ranches, we’ll net the whole vineyard if it’s in the southern part of the appellation or high up in the hills. In the north, we just net along the road where the power lines are because that’s where the birds like to sit and show up.
We're also doing color thinning and trying to ensure as much uniformity as possible in our vineyards. One of the exciting yet challenging things we started last week is sampling. We have to do 57 of these samples throughout the week during harvesting. It takes quite a bit of time—about six to eight hours to go through the entire process. We sample each block and measure the sugar content. It doesn’t matter if that block will produce 120 cases or 1,000 cases of wine; we go through and test it. We walk through the entire section, pick into these little quarter bins or buckets, crush the grapes, and use a refractometer. For those familiar with brewing, it's similar to a hydrometer but uses refracted light to measure how much sugar is in the solution. Right now, it’s showing 20 Brix, which is essentially 20 grams of sucrose in a 100-milliliter solution. Wineries use this number to gauge when they want to pick, sometimes based on Brix, acid, or purely by taste. But that Brix number is really important because it gives them an idea of when a block is ready to pick.
At 20 Brix, we generally move about a Brix and a half every week. Right now, we have blocks anywhere from 16 Brix to 20 Brix, which means a difference of about two and a half weeks. So, we’re projecting to start picking Pinot Noir around September 9th, with Chardonnay following two to three weeks later, around October 1st. It’s the calm before the storm, and after that, our significant others become what we call "harvest widows."
Moderator:
Adam, do you have a sense of which vineyard will be the first?
Moderator:
Lee, I mean, Adam—Adam Franscioni, sorry. Out of the vineyards you’re checking, do you have an idea which ones will be ready to harvest first?
Adam Franscioni:
Typically, we harvest from south to north, but due to the early spring this year, the north has been ahead of the south. So, I think vineyards like Garys’, Soberanes, or Rosella’s will be among the first to come off, with Sierra Mar catching up later. It will be a longer harvest period, but it will progress quickly. Sounds like you’re busy. Thank you.
Let’s now turn to winemaker Adam Lee. You’ve been driving all over the place for weeks now. Can you tell us what’s happening in your world and what you’re seeing out there?
Adam Lee:
Sure. Some of what I’m doing is similar to what Adam was discussing—getting everything prepped. This involves making sure we have clean picking bins so that when a truck arrives, whether it’s a backhaul or otherwise, we’re ready to load and transport the grapes. You don’t want to be caught off guard without bins when the opportunity arises. It’s also about preparing for sampling, ensuring you have the right equipment like refractometers, and dealing with minor hiccups like forgetting a Sharpie. Even after 31 harvests, small details can be overlooked.
The process is fascinating. There’s excitement and nervousness as we try to predict which vineyards will come in first. For instance, today’s readings showed unexpected variations. While some vineyards didn’t advance much, one moved faster than anticipated. This includes the new Wind Rock vineyard, which, despite rocky soils and a smaller crop, might not come in first as initially thought. The next few weeks will be full of surprises, and it’s fun to speculate. We also need to coordinate the logistics, figuring out whether we can fit enough grapes from Wind Rock into a truckload and what else might need to be picked.
Another challenge is managing relationships with multiple winemakers. Each has different preferences, and it’s important to cater to those needs. I keep detailed notes on these preferences, which helps in managing the varying expectations for harvest. It’s intriguing to see how winemaker preferences evolve over time, especially as new winemakers bring different approaches.
Moderator:
Steve, in addition to your own vineyard in the Santa Lucia Highlands, you’re overseeing 17,000 acres across California. What does this period leading up to and during harvest look like for your teams?
Steve:
This period is what I call “hurry up and wait.” We’re anticipating, feeling nervous, and preparing for the hard work ahead. During the growing season, we juggle pest control, irrigation, and other tasks. But during harvest, it’s about meeting expectations and getting the crop in. For our highlands vineyard, everything is hand-harvested in small bins and refrigerated transport. For other vineyards, we use larger gondolas, but we have to check them for unexpected surprises, like mattresses used by homeless individuals. It’s a bit like a military campaign—focused and efficient, with all resources dedicated to getting the grapes to the winery within a tight timeframe. Safety is also a top priority during these long hours.
Moderator:
Let’s take a moment for any questions from the audience. Feel free to drop them in the chat.
One of the topics we want to cover is the 2023 vintage and recent bottling. Adam Franscioni, could you give us an update on bottling?
Adam Francioni:
We recently bottled our Pinos and Viognier, which were aged for 11 months in barrels. The Chardonnays and Syrah were also bottled. Bottling is a tedious and stressful process, requiring meticulous organization to avoid errors like incorrect labeling. After bottling, we get a brief respite before harvest begins. The 2023 vintage looks stellar—conditions were ideal with good yields, making for an exciting vintage. Though the wines might show some bottle shock initially, we’re looking forward to tasting them in early 2025.
Moderator:
Adam Lee, there’s a question in the chat from Kathy Chadwick about the size of the vineyard blocks. Can you shed some light on that?
Adam Lee:
The size of vineyard blocks can vary significantly. For example, new plantings like the five-acre blocks for Grant’s vineyard are common, but blocks can also be as small as an acre or even half an acre. Smaller blocks can be challenging for winemakers, especially when it comes to transporting and fermenting small quantities economically.
The 2023 vintage is shaping up to be a classic. It has a graceful, elegant character, much like a classic film star. The longer, cooler growing season has led to well-balanced, elegant wines that are expected to age beautifully.
Moderator:
Bill Eggers asked about the differences between the Santa Lucia Highlands and the Santa Rita Hills, and the trend towards picking at lower Brix levels. Can you elaborate?
Adam Lee:
Santa Rita Hills, being an east-west valley, gets wind all day, which slows ripening. Santa Lucia Highlands, with its northwest-southeast orientation, receives wind in the afternoon, affecting ripening differently. Santa Rita’s berries are smaller and thicker-skinned, leading to later picking for tannin balance. The trend towards picking at lower Brix levels reflects vine maturity and improved resilience to drought, rather than a passing trend.
Moderator:
Any final thoughts on what to expect in the coming weeks?
Adam Franscioni:
We’re looking forward to the start of harvest. Much can change in the final stretch of the growing season. Yields might be affected by the berry size and cluster count. It’s an exciting time with a lot of potential for the 2023 vintage.
Moderator: Thank you, Steve. I wonder if you would touch on a question here from Mark Hill, who is talking about the balance between chasing sugar and chasing ripeness. We often discuss how we have such a unique perspective on this in the Santa Lucia Highlands, as it really isn't hard to achieve both each year. Maybe you can speak to that a little bit.
Steve: Yeah, sure. Certainly, the wind is a big component in helping us achieve physiological ripeness while limiting sugar accumulation. When the wind reaches a certain velocity, the vines reduce their photosynthetic output. As a result, the carbon created in photosynthesis is partitioned differently than it would be under full photosynthetic conditions. With full photosynthesis, more carbon goes into sugar accumulation. When this is limited, the vine redirects more carbon into other elements that we're really looking for, such as aroma precursors and structural molecules like flavonoids, tannins, and anthocyanins. So, the wind is part of what I like to call the terroir—it's everything we can't change and wouldn't want to, although it's tough on some afternoons. Today was particularly bad; you couldn't really hold a conversation outside of your truck for very long without feeling the effects of that wind.
Moderator: Any last comments from our panel regarding what you expect over the next couple of weeks?
Adam Franscioni: I think September 9th...
Adam Franscioni: Well, it's cool. What constitutes the start of harvest is kind of in the eye of the beholder. If I'm getting up at 9 PM, even if it's just one night, that's the start of harvest to me. But some people are like, "No, you have to be in the middle of it." But I'm really looking forward to it. We started bud break on March 11th, and over the past six or seven months, a lot has happened. But this next month is really key, and so much can happen. During the growing season, the berries are filled with acid, or they're flowering. A lot can happen during flowering and set. But post that, they're pretty durable. But now, when they get soft, when the skin softens, a lot can happen. They're more susceptible to sunburn and heat. So it's a really fun time. We'll just see how it goes. I'm curious what the yields will be. Like Adam mentioned earlier, we did have a smaller cluster count, marginally, but still. I feel like the fruit has definitely gotten heavier, but I still notice the actual berry size structure is a little smaller than what we normally see.
Unknown Speaker: Peas and pumpkins, Adam?
Unknown Speaker: Sorry, pumpkins and what?
Unknown Speaker: Peas and pumpkins, exactly.
Unknown Speaker: That's interesting, right?
Unknown Speaker: Exactly. In Texas, all our berries are really big.
Unknown Speaker: Yeah, so it will probably be average, but I'm curious to see what it will be.
Moderator: Adam, what about you? Any last predictions?
Adam Lee: Sure, September 16th—because it's a full moon, and Adam's dad, Gary, believes in those kinds of things. At this moment, I don't know any better than to guess that, and that's as good a reason as you can come up with. It's like going $1 over on "The Price is Right."
Unknown Speaker: It is, exactly.
Adam Franscioni: I think we've got a couple of warmer days coming up on Sunday and Monday, maybe a little bit on Tuesday. But then the forecast, which is almost a week out but getting closer, seems like it's cooling down a good bit after that. So it's not scheduled to be—serious knock on wood here—it's not scheduled to be the long heat spike, like the seven days or so we had in 2022 and other years. It looks like a very short burst of some heat, not even that hot, which will maybe move things along a little bit. But if we can settle into this somewhat mild pattern, it could be absolutely fantastic.
Moderator: How about you, Steve? Any last comments, predictions, or wishes for this harvest?
Steve: Oh, plenty of wishes. But I'll just say that I don't put any stock in the weather that's more than three days out, because you have to get three supercomputers to agree, and that's pretty tough. So it's a coin flip for me beyond three days. I will say, though, that it never fails on a full moon—we are busier than all heck, and it just never fails. I've been doing this for 42 years, so there may be something to it. The other interesting thing is that when the hurricane season in the Atlantic and the Caribbean is at full tilt, those low pressures are so powerful that they really do keep storms from coming into California. So, not that I'd want a hurricane in the Caribbean to cause any damage, but it is a good omen for harvest here in California. I'm optimistic it could be a fantastic year, and we'll just take it three days at a time.
Moderator: Well, thank you all. We certainly wish everyone a very happy and safe harvest.
