After last year’s early, compressed sprint-like harvest, I was hoping for a more leisurely pace for the ‘marathon’ called harvest this year. Instead, we saw a harvest season that in the beginning appeared very much like 2013 – early and compressed. However, it turned out to be very evenly paced and without undue crunch of time. Once again, it allowed me to focus on ‘outdoor things’ like sampling vineyards and planning the harvesting order rather than being stretched thinly between that and managing and performing ‘indoor winemaking things’ at the same time. As I’ve remarked before, as I have a place to ferment everything at once so there were no compromises made on harvesting dates or time in tank as usual. There’s simply the limitation of how many waking hours a person has. I also did not have to sleep the night at the winery once, while in 2013 I set records for total number of nights as well as consecutive nights slept over the office. So the harvest pace was somewhere between a marathon and a sprint. I would take another one like that any year.
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