Harvest 2012: Estate Seyval Blanc at Hudson-Chatham Winery

We harvested approximately one ton of seyval blanc from our North Creek Vineyard, Block 1 location yesterday. Brix were at 21.

We would have actually let it sit longer, but extreme bird pressure and deer pressure led us to pick it earlier than we would have liked. We had several growing experts come in a take a look at it and help us make our calculation to pick. All agreed that we had excellent fruit, and nice production.

We’ve found bird pressure immense this year. Possibly, with the drought-like conditions in the Hudson Valley earlier in the season, animals have been looking for food sources rich in liquid. That’s just a stupid guess on my part.

Regardless, we had our best crop ever. Nice tonnage (though we probably left some out there with the birds and deer. Possibly as much as 50% more that was lost to animal pressure). Flavor was one of the biggest reasons we decided to go ahead. Our flavor profile was good. We had nice maturation in our fruit. Seeds were mature, and good flavor in our skins.

This is our premiere white wine. This is one of the most important decisions we face this year. It was the right call, and we feel very confident that it’ll result in a beautiful wine.

Ten days ago the vineyard was at 19 brix and we decided to let it hang a little longer, hopefully driving down some acidity. But mother nature wasn’t going to let those grapes hang out there undisturbed. We watched the brix clime through the course of the week, but we also saw a greater degree of grapes disappearing each day. Sometimes the deer and birds know more than we do.