This last August we bottled all of the 2022 vintage red wines. After two years of racking, topping, aging, tasting and blending the 2022 vintage was finally ready to be bottled. These wines are just now starting to come into their own in the bottle, tasting great, and are ready to be enjoyed. While bottling signifies the finality of a wine’s time in our winemaking process, harvest is the starting point.  Bottling in August is always a risky choice knowing that harvest is right around the corner. This year with the intense heat we experienced over the summer we saw an abnormally early harvest. This led us to go quite literally from bottling one day to picking grapes the next. We hit the ground running into harvest and had what normally is 7-9 weeks of harvest compressed into 5 weeks. At times we had many of our numerous vineyard blocks reaching optimal ripeness within days of one another. This created a very unique situation where at one point we had all of our red wines crushed and fermenting at one time, something we have never seen before. Now that the 2024 harvest is in the books we can start to get a sense of how the new vintage is shaping up. While still in its infancy, the 2024 vintage is showing some very promising traits that we don’t see every year. This young vintage is showing a wonderful balance of ripeness and acidity, intense color coming from slightly warmer fermentations, and a weight and texture that has us very excited about what’s to come.