Resting Post-Harvest

Wow. What a crazy harvest season.

With every year in Ohio there are new challenges. It's like playing poker - you don't know how good your hand is but you're betting all in and Mother Nature is holding all the cards.
This year, I got a Queen and a Jack and on the flop, it was a 2 and a 6.... Excellent spring. Beautiful. No late frost, I was thinking -Man, this year is going to be great! And then it never stopped raining. Well, it stopped for a bit in the heat of the summer but then it kicked back up again.
The spring was wet. The fall is turning out to be wet. I can't tell you the panic I felt right before harvest as I watched the rain spread a fungus just days before harvesting and almost ruining my whole crop.

But it all turned out. Maybe not always the way that I had anticipated though, but this year's harvest is going to be yet another very interesting vintage.
That -no late frost- that I mentioned... well, turns out that if you don't have a frost to nip back all your primary buds then you end up with a whole lotta fruit. While I was running around putting together the tasting room, building a menu, and trying to figure out how to staff this place, I just curiously would look at the vines on occasion with a -that's weird- little look. I watched the blooms come out this year, which are huge on the primary buds with no late frost. I usually leave a lot of buds on when I first go through the vineyard and then go back through about 3 more times to cut more off and cut more off to control my crop, but time management got the best of me and I found myself spending more time putting grow tubes on the newly planted vines than thinning out the older ones. I figured, hey, I've been doing this for a few years and so I know what I'm doing. I don't need to count buds.
WRONG.

By the time the Marquettes had to be harvested in mid-September, I couldn't even properly do harvest estimates because there were so many clusters I couldn't see them all. It turned out to be over double what we harvested last year!
The Frontenac and F. Gris followed suit with massive yields as well. The Corot Noir, Vidal, Noriet and Traiminette, however, did not follow suit but instead succumbed to the terrible weather and didn't turn out producing much.

So now my tanks are full. We'll see how fermentation goes...