Oh that fall light when the sun is out... cabernet sauvignon trying to soak up the last rays of this sunny and salubrious stretch of days. This vintage has been, in a word, tantalizing.
The back story: We prize wines with tannins that are both ever-present, yet barely perceptible. By that we mean the kind of wine in which tannin is not noticeable at first sip, but by the halfway point of your first glass the tannins have created a lingering presence that provides a subtle exclamation point to every sip, and every bite of food. In a word: subtle. After veraison we walk the vineyard at least weekly, tasting berries as we go, and excellent tannins have been a defining feature of both skins and seeds since late August. We don't know if is because of the unusually cool temps, vine age, or the culmination of incremental improvements in farming, but the tannins we desire there. But the cool temperatures have kept acids so high, and maturation so slow, we have found ourselves in a seemingly interminable waiting game. If we harvest with too much acid we fear the acid will obscure the other aspects of the wine, and that too thick skins will be reluctant to give up their tannins. So we wait. This last week has been cool and sunny, our canopy is in fantastic shape, little green solar panels collecting energy for incremental steps in maturation - depth of flavor has increased with every day. So we are opting to wait through this hurricane, to try and reap the sunny and mild days forecasted to begin this Tuesday and persist through the next weekend. No "split picks", we're keeping all our berries in a single basket. In the end we may not reach the goal of tannin/acid balance, and end up making rosé (hopefully the best damn rosé imaginable). We may find ourselves picking in the middle of the storm because we miscalculate the resiliency left in the berry skins. Or we'll nail it, but in truth we simply have no idea what will happen. Wish us luck!