This week Dean Underwood, our vineyard manager here at Olsen has his final report on the harvest. It’s a great read for anyone interested in the rewards and challenges of running a winery from year to year. If anything, the old saying holds true, even in our advanced scientific era, “you can’t control mother nature.” In addition, lots of folks have asked us about our new harvest machine, it’s pretty interesting stuff:

This rainy weather has given me lots of spare time to answer questions and reflect on harvest.

We are finished with harvest. Our yields were light but I understand the entire Willamette Valley had light crops as well. With light crops comes high quality. I really do think our 2008 vintage will be one to remember. Our quality is exceptional due to the fact the fruit has great flavors and we have Bill on board to craft it with his masters touch.

The harvest machine we used the most was a custom harvest by Mike Freeman. We paid him by the acre to harvest our grapes with his new Pellanc mechanical harvester. This machine has a new state of the art de-stemmer on board that was very impressive. There are only 50 of these de-stemmers in the world and mike bought this machine at the viticulture show in Paris last year. It did a great job of harvesting the pinot noir. We still cannot harvest the pinot gris efficiently by machine though. The Gris skin color bleeds into the juice when machine harvested with makes the wine pink like a rose’. Technology is still a ways out before we can quit hand picking completely. Since the pinot noir benefits from skin contact the machine harvest is a natural for it. We also tested a Korvan harvester which is manufactured in eastern Washington and a Braud which is made in France and imported by New Holland. This gave us a chance to do side by side comparisons such as how effective the machine picked the grapes from the vine, how much MOG was picked with the grapes (material other than grapes) and how gentle the harvester was to the berries.

The fancy harvest machine

The machines were equal in all categories with the exception of the Pellanc which had no MOG in the bins after harvest. I believe we will purchase one eventually. The machine can be used year around with different attachments mounted on it such as a three row sprayer, hedger, leaf puller and a pre-pruner. It would certainly pay for itself in a short amount of time even at the price of $400,000.00+.

Thanks,

Dean.