‘Some people have already started picking their whites; our Sauvignon Blanc is about a week away from being ready, so now we’re just waiting for that optimum time to pick. The first thing I do every morning right now is look at all my weather apps. Weather.com, Weather Underground, NOAA (National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administation) and Precision Forecasting, which is a local meteorological system specifically for the agriculture industry. Plus we have our own internal weather stations and monitoring tools in the vineyard. The trouble is, they don’t always tell you the same thing, but over the years you tend to know which are better for rain vs heat, and which predictions you really need to pay attention to. Plus it’s a pretty close community here, so I’m always comparing notes with other winemakers. 

‘The reds are still going through veraison (changing colour), so now is about fine-tuning. We’re going through the vineyards and taking out any half-green clusters that are way behind the others – they’re never going to catch up now, and one here and there can make a big difference. Also, if any shoots haven’t lignified [turned from green to woody], that’s a sign that they’re not developing at the same pace, so if there’s two clusters on the shoot, we might drop one, to help the other. 

‘The harvest is tracking about two to three weeks earlier than last year, which was a long, cool season. I don’t mind an early harvest, because there’s less time for things to go wrong late on. We have 160 acres of vineyard which we farm and harvest ourselves, and harvest takes four to five weeks because of the diversity of soil and elevations here. So a late harvest can worry me if it everything gets concentrated into three weeks towards the end of October, when things get riskier with rain and weather. 

‘All in all, it’s been a pretty good season. Winter rainfall is incredibly important in setting up the season here, and we’ve had two years of above-average levels at the start of the year, which fills the soil to water-holding capacity, so the vines start off on a good path, and also fills the reservoirs that we use for irrigation. There was good moisture in the soil for vines to start growing without a lot of stress, which is great. And we needed the water in the summer, which was warmer than average in June and July [Napa recorded two weeks of temperatures above 90˚F]. Around summer solstice the shoots stop growing and the vine switches all its efforts to [developing] the fruit. That coincided with this warmer July, which is why I’m optimistic about 2024 – the natural timing has been almost exactly as we would want. 

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