Labor Day at Texas Wineries and Vineyards
This Summer of 2024 has been a season of normal summer heat with temperatures rarely reaching 100 degrees. This has provided a wonderful growing season with rains at the right times. Normally, we start to transition to the Fall with cooler temperatures on the way. This past Labor Day normally marks the transition from lighter clothing, lighter foods, and lighter wines to heavier clothing as the weather cools. In addition, our foods normally get heavier as we transition to red wines which are heavier. It looks like we will have our first cold front of the year this weekend in the Houston area. This cooler weather will help make this transition.
Texas is enjoying another outstanding year of a quality harvest through the past Labor Day weekend. Grape quantities are average this year since all of Texas, including grape vines had an average summer of weather. The grapes have been harvested along the Gulf Coast and the Texas Hill County. The grapes on the Texas High plains have everyone abuzz about 2024 being another awesome year for Texas, once of the BEST ever! About 70% of the Texas grapes are harvested on the flat lands of the Texas High Plains. These flat lands make harvesting grapes easy with mechanical grape harvesters. These machines have vibrating sides on each side of the rows of grape vines guided by a wheeled mechanism. About 100 grape pickers equal the daily output of just one mechanical harvester. With lack of farm labor, Texas is not being impacted unlike California with its steeply sloping vineyards and lack of farm hands. These machine-harvested grapes come into the winery cleaner and faster than hand-harvested grapes. As a result of a faster accumulation of grapes via mechanical harvester, the grapes arrive at the wineries in less than 90 minutes vs. several hours of vineyard storage and accumulation of grapes to justify transportation to the winery by truck. The grapes that arrive faster from mechanical harvest have a temperature about one to two degrees above ambient air temperature. However, grapes that have to reside in the storage bins in vineyards for hours start fermentation via rogue yeasts and bacteria. These rogue fermentations raise these grapes’ temperatures to about 10 to 15 degrees warmer than ambient air temperature. Winemakers have no control over these rogue fermentations and sometime have unusual tastes that the winemaker does NOT want to have in his wines. With this type of mechanical harvesting, Texas wineries are experiencing better quality grapes at the winery. Although the final end of the grape harvest is several weeks away, most everyone agrees that Texas is finding its identity and making lots of award-winning wines. As we look into another quality grape harvest, it appears that Texas is poised to continue to earn the recognition it has earned year after year with more BEST in SHOW, Gold Medals and Double Gold Medals. Grapes in California have not been harvested to the extent that is seen in Texas.