Grape Harvests across Texas are starting earlier than normal due to an early Spring. This year brings a new twist to the grape harvest with pickers being distanced in the vineyards and mechanical harvesters picking up the pace. There are still some volunteer opportunities if you want to experience the grape harvest. Flat Creek Estate Winery and Vineyards will be harvesting their Texas Hill Country Vineyards on Friday, Saturday, and Sunday mornings starting at 6:15 am and working through 11 am. Reservations are a must in order to experience a grape harvest. Please go online at https://flatcreekestate.rezdy.com/402306/harvest-2020 to register for this grape harvest near Marble Falls. They will be harvesting their reds, being Syrah, Tempranillo, and Sangiovese.
Grapes are coming in from the various parts of Texas with some good news and some not so good. A freeze last winter hit several Texas High Plains vineyards very hard. Below are reports from several Texas wineries:
Pedernales Cellars
Co-Founder David Kuhlken reported, “This is the craziest year I have ever seen, with the 2020 harvest being a low-yield year, but the fruit quality should be good. With COVID-19 closing wineries and stalling sales, it’s probably a good thing that the 2020 vintage is smaller than usual because many wineries are cash-strapped to purchase fruit. We started harvest at our estate vineyard, Kuhlken Vineyards, on Tuesday, July 21 with Tempranillo (yield and ripeness look good), followed by Albarino and Mourvèdre. Because some of the biggest vineyards we work with experienced significant damage from an October 2019 freeze, we have turned to other vineyards to source Tempranillo and some Italian varieties including Teroldego, Dolcetto, Montepulciano and Sangiovese.”
Co-Founder Julie Kuhlken told me, “We will handle most of our Hill Country estate harvest with just our team, which has been working together throughout the shut downs and following strict safety protocols. We will keep plenty of social distance spacing. In the High Plains, many of the large blocks that we would usually machine harvest were damaged by the early fall freeze in 2019, and instead we will harvest many smaller lots by hand, again relying heavily on our own team. For the same reasons, we will not be using the custom crush facilities in the High Plains, instead bringing the fruit to Pedernales Cellars to be processed by our team.”
Spicewood Vineyards
Owner Ron Yates said, ”We started our white grape harvest the week of July 13, including our Sauvignon Blanc, Muscat and Viognier, with lower yields than normal, but great fruit quality and intensity. We will pick reds the week of July 20 and hope to finish up this weekend if the tropical storm heads this way. We expect to get very little production from the Texas High Plains vineyards, but thanks to the past two years, we have plenty of wine in barrels and tanks that will allow us to continue our popular varieties as well as experiment with some new blends.”
Bending Branch Winery
General Manager Jennifer McInnis told me, “We are getting more fruit this year than in the past from the Texas Hill Country, with harvest getting underway around July 27 with Tannat from our estate vineyard, Lost Pirogue Vineyard, and Tempranillo from a nearby vineyard. All of our Picpoul this year will come from the estate vineyard. We are anticipating a great Malbec harvest from Cherokee Rose Vineyard in Comfort. We are about to release the first Malbec Reserve from that vineyard. I am very excited about the quality of our fruit this year – its intensity and concentration is really exceptional. We will get some fruit from the Texas High Plains; overall, the fruit will come from smaller lots from multiple vineyards. Given harvest will be made up of smaller lots, we will not use the flash détente technology as much this year, and instead, will focus on small-batch, whole-berry fermentation and cryomaceration. We will use this opportunity to make more reserve and special selection wines. It’s a bit of a relief the 2020 will not deliver a bumper crop like the past two years. Everybody got more fruit than they committed for last year. With our tasting room closed since March and lower sales, it would have been difficult to take on additional fruit from a big crop.”
Brennan Vineyards
Vineyard Manager Travis Conley said, “We are expecting normal yields from our Comanche and Newburg Vineyards and fruit quality is looking great; our Muscat of Alexandria and Nero d’Avola look spectacular. We harvested Viognier the week of July 20 (which is one of our earliest harvest dates), followed by Semillon, Tempranillo, Muscat and Nero. Given the heat and drought, I expect this to be a fast-and-furious harvest, harvesting one variety after another, and picking everything by the end of August (last year, we completed our estate harvest about mid-September). Things are moving slower in the Texas High Plains; while we get much lower yields than normal from the growers there, the quality looks great.”
Duchman Family Winery
Winemaker Dave Reilly replied to my inquiry on their harvest, “2020 will go down in history for many reasons; a bumper crop will not be one of them. Due to the freeze event last October on the Texas High Plains, we are not expecting to harvest any white wine grapes this year except for Roussanne. We expect very low yields from the red varieties, with the exception of Sangiovese. Fingers crossed for 2021.”
Texas ‘Father of Blanc du Bois’ is Retiring
A Texas icon, Raymond Haak, founder of Haak Winery in Galveston County has sold most of his interest in the winery he founded twenty years ago. Many consider Raymond Haak the reason why Texas is growing Blanc du Bois in such outstanding quality and quantity. More on this in next week’s column.