It’s no 2011 Jay, but there are some significant losses in the Santa Cruz Mountain vineyards. With the warm, dry and basically non-existent winter, we had unusually early budbreak and we started flowering quite early for us. It’s been a roller coaster so far, with late March frost that wasn’t as bad as it could have been, to flowering in Chardonnay as early as March 25th, and then winter finally arriving in May. Typically for us, May flowering is not a good thing, and that’s what happened this year. The unusually cool month brought about 4 straight weeks of heavy, dense wet fog to the mountains which caused a lot of serious shatter. Horseshoe is almost a wipeout, meaning less than 1/2 ton per acre. Alpine fared better, though without the production we’ve seen the last few years. The same holds for Skyline, with it’s measly production down even more than normal. Family Farm, Home and Bearwallow are all down slightly as well. It’s hard to say right now, but we might have lost around a third of our crop, more or less. Obviously it’s too early to comment on quality though, although we’ve made some good wines in challenging years in the past. Hell, until 2012 they were all challenging years! I actually think that what’s there looks promising.
2013 was a warm summer in Oregon, but September rain defined the vintage.
2012 was slightly cooler than average, dry to be sure, but late September / early October warm weather with dry east winds defined the vintage.
End of season weather is so critical to final wine quality, not that the rest of the season is irrelevant. But I was convinced '13s were going to be the new '06 and things turned out totally differently.
The Oregon crop looks pretty healthy/large, which is good for the warm weather. Gives the dogs (vines) more room to run.
Vincent
It’s never too early.
End of season weather is so critical to final wine quality, not that the rest of the season is irrelevant. But I was convinced '13s were going to be the new '06 and things turned out totally differently.
Vincent[/quote]
One of my early mentors John Scharffenberger always said that the last 6 weeks of the vintage was the defining part of the year. I think that is pretty true. The reduced crop should have a positive effect on 2015. Plus, we’re goona save a boatload on labor to thin. Of course our harvest costs will go up so…whatever!
If the concern is extreme heat producing an overripe vintage, my impression is that California is ahead of normal, but not nearly the outlier that Oregon or Washington has been. It’s difficult to generalize about an area as broad as California, let alone the entire west coast.
Thanks all for the interesting information. All good points.
I found this fascinating when you mentioned it Friday. For those wanting data backing up Vincent’s points, here it is.
http://oregonpinotcamp.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/06/Multiple-Personalities-2015.pdf?06f6cd page 36.
I think it seems pretty clear yields will be lower in California, after so little rainfall last winter. That’s bad news for growers, but what will it mean for consumers? Often, small crops are good vintages for the wine quality, right? Will that be the case this time? I guess that depends a lot on what happens between now and harvest.
And California wines don’t have big vintage pricing swings the way French wines do, so I wouldn’t expect the price for a 2015 bottle of whatever wine to be much different than the price for the 2013 of the same wine. Though if you’re buying a tightly allocated wine, you’ll probably get a smaller allocation of the 2015 than you got of the 2012 and 2013. But Rhys isn’t going to double the price of Alpine pinot for 2015 because their crop was half the size; the markets don’t work that way in California and Oregon wine.
Laughing a bit - of course, when I read "U.S. 2015 vintage, " I read “Napa Cabernet.” And as others have noted, I have little sense for determining sarcasm.
Moving right along…
Casey and I hold up the year-round endposts of “The Weather Thread,” over on the Cellar Rats forum here on Berserkers. Other folks chime in as well, and I think you can get some better sense of what is going on out in the vineyards.
But for now, I would say that my vineyard here at EMH is hurting from lack of sufficient rainfall during the winter. Once or twice during the winter, we thought we had it nailed. but no such luck. Where that shows is the early yellowing of basal leaves (I’m not a scientist, nor have I studied viticulture) and some shorter shoots on some vines than I think is “normal” - whatever that is. We need some green to complete our ripening.
We lost nothing to frost, here, this year. Not an issue. Frost alarms perhaps 3 times.
I have read reports of shatter, and I know Casey has been concerned about that all growing season, but I honestly don’t see it here at my place. My St. George rootstock is, again this year, putting out many clusters and those vines are very well, um, hung. That is about 7% of the vineyard. But they are my oldest, and among my strongest, vines (planted somewhere between 1988 and 1995).
Had to spray for leafhoppers. They love my place.
I have seen no evidence of sunburn, which is a typical threat here when we hit 100 or above. We have had some of those days, but so far I see nothing. Of course I will be checking again later this evening or in the morning.
Sorry about the long post.
Ron, I’m about ready to declare my back yard raspberry crop a failure. Early to ripen, but super small berries. Some might blame my progressive organic farming technique a.k.a. neglect, but I’m blaming the weather.
Michael
Screwed. 
I can’t imagine 2015 will be a great year for the Texas Hill Country with all of the rain they’ve had.
Vintage of the century.
It better be Beau!
Never stopped. Hope the NW hops are having a good year.
My yields look like shit-- some post-budbreak frost in March and the crappy weather during set in May. This looks like a 2011 crop, in terms of volume. The saving grace for 2011 was the extremely cool summer and the fact that the growing season didn’t commence as wildly early as this year. If we don’t get a cool July and August, this year’s very early and very light crop could ripen at a much faster pace than 2011. I’m bracing for my first August harvest. I’d much rather that my last 6 weeks of growing season skewed more toward Sept/Oct than Aug/July. Count me a pessimist.
If that is true, then why not edit the title? You could remove the unintended negativity, and lose the sophomoric vulgarity at the same time… ![[cheers.gif]](/uploads/db3686/original/2X/0/0ff9bfcdb0964982cd3240b6159868fbdf215b1a.gif "cheers"){kind=small}
I agree that a warm year + low yields isn’t a great combination…esp since some things ripen with heat (esp sugar) and other things ripen with number of days (well, sort of…close enough, anyways, tannins are in this group) and every thing else is ‘in between’. Having a smaller number of grapes be the target of fast ripening makes balanced wines harder to achieve. But things aren’t playing out that way so far/yet.
I vote with Lewis to change the title to something more neutral/appropriate.
I was in the Fort Ross/Seaview AVA yesterday and yields look to be down 50% where I looked. Even in some Cab spots I see yields down 10-40%. Gonna be a hard year to be a grower, but for Cab at least, the vines wanted to produce less this year anyway after three large crops in a row. They needed a break.
Yields are low for Cab and brutal for Pinot.
I am worried about what seem increasingly confident predictions that this will be a very wet fall.