Members of the winemaking and production team at Schramsberg bless the grapes with wine from a previous year's vintage.
Vintner Hugh Davies pours wine from a previous Schramsberg vintage over newly harvested grapes in celebration of the year's harvest beginning.
A bottle of Schramsberg Brut Rose from 2016 atop recently harvested pinot noir grapes.
Vintner Hugh Davies, left, pours sparkling wine over recently harvested Pinot Noir grapes in celebration of the 2020 harvest beginning.
A seemingly endless sea of Pinot Noir glinted in the sun as it streamed into the crusher. And just like that, it was harvest again in Napa Valley.
This week marked the beginning of the 2020 harvest for some of the Valley’s sparkling producers, including Mumm Napa, which brought in its first load of grapes Monday, and Schramsberg, which Wednesday held an understated celebration to mark the first of its grapes to be crushed.
Grapes for sparkling wine are typically the first to be harvested to maintain higher acidity levels in fruit. In years past, the first day of the season has been a decidedly celebratory one for wineries like Mumm and Schramsberg – though this year, for obvious reasons, the large crowds and boisterous gatherings had been boiled down. At Schramsberg, vintner Hugh Davies spoke to a crowd no larger than 20 people, mostly winery and vineyard workers.
“I wanted to thank everybody for working through COVID,” Davies told the crowd in Spanish and English, standing over the Pinot Noir grapes he said had been sourced from a vineyard on Bayview Avenue in the Carneros region southwest of Napa. That vineyard has historically been the first from which Schramsberg harvests, he said, noting that this year the date had come about 10 days earlier than average.
He thanked workers for adhering to safety protocol, and expressed gratitude that the winery’s staff had remained out of the path of the virus so far.
Masked winemakers and crew members sabered bottles of Schramsberg sparkling wine with large knives, popping off the corks and pouring the wine over the to-be-crushed grapes. Glasses of Schramsberg’s sparkling wine were poured into glasses; team members stepped six feet apart from each other, slowly removed their masks and toasted to the new season.
The year’s yield will prove slightly smaller than last year’s, according to Davies, who said the winery had already been planning to cut back production in the wake of the grape glut and mounting economic uncertainty as a result of the pandemic.
Tami Lotz, winemaker at Mumm Napa, said she too believed the year’s harvest would be “a fairly quick one” as grapes across vineyards were ripening “close to the same time.” Mumm had kept its celebratory ceremony similarly small, she said, noting that the staff had done a quick blessing of the grapes before proceeding.
A number of uncertainties face Napa’s wine industry this harvest: impact of the pandemic on business; last year’s decline in consumer demand from consumers coupled with the residual oversupply of wine from a monumental 2018 harvest; and fire season, which last year pockmarked harvest time with power shutoffs and in previous years has prompted smoke-taint scares.
All of those things were on Davies’ mind as he watched the small celebration. Something he’s continually reminded himself of through the pandemic, he said, is how lucky he’s been to live in Napa Valley.
“We’ve been able to continue to tend vines, we’ve been able to make our wines and sell them,” he said. “It is more challenging, no doubt. But I remain very optimistic that this’ll be one of those bumps in the road we’ll (eventually) look back on.”
Schramsberg plans to bring in one more load of Chardonnay later this week, Davies said, and over the next two weeks will begin moving into harvest at full speed.
You can reach Sarah Klearman at (707) 256-2213 or sklearman@napanews.com.
Sign up now to get the most recent coronavirus headlines and other important local and national news sent to your email inbox daily.
August 07, 2020 at 02:00AM
https://ift.tt/3kjDaBH
Grape harvest kicks off in Napa Valley with muted celebrations - Napa Valley Register
https://ift.tt/3eO3jWb
Grape
No comments:
Post a Comment