Last Fruit!

Today is a joyous day at the winery, to be celebrated with raucous cheers and a mammoth pizza: the last day of fruit receival.  People often confuse the last day of fruit with the mythical “end of harvest”, but rest assured this is not the case.  Although you may bring in the last of the fruit hanging on the vine, it still needs to be babied through ferment, properly managed, and put to bed safely in stainless steel or oak barrels until deemed ready for bottling.  The fermentation stages can be just as stressful as fruit receival, but the last day of fruit signals a light at the end of a tunnel, that the tide of grapey goodness has been stemmed (or destemmed?  haha?) for another year and that the 2009 wines are all in house waiting to be molded into the next vintage of Creekside offerings.

The last fruit of the vintage, quite absurdly, is a vineyard of 23+ Brix Sauvignon Blanc.  The last of the big reds, in our case Cabernet Sauvignon and Cabernet Franc, were brought into the winery yesterday and this Sauv Blanc, well, it just kind of magically appeared on our fruit docket thanks to some vineyard scouting from Craig.  I do think that this is the first time that I can remember in four years that we’re finishing on a white variety.  In a way the oddity of it all perfectly encapsulates what has been an extremely bizarre 2009 crush.  It’s been a vintage of duality, with frost and sun, cold and warmth, high sugar and high acid, basically every normally opposing pair has occurred, if not simultaneously, at least in close succession this year.  It’s been a head-scratcher from a management standpoint, and I imagine the grape growers are also left slightly bemused by the entire affair.  Still,  we’ve got some astoundingly good stuff squirreled away in the winery across all varietals and it will be very exciting to see if the wines themselves mirror the quirkiness and complexity of the harvest season.