Grape Harvest
Grape Harvest. I’m Greg Martin with today’s Fruit Grower Report.
It does appear that the cold winter weather has arrived here in the Northwest and that means most of the harvesting is over. According to
SCHARLAU: The weather conditions for harvest were actually ideal for ripening; you know we had warm sunny days, dry and cool nights. Of course most of the harvest luckily was harvested before we experienced our unprecedented frost that hit in mid October but the frost was really an opportunity to move the end of harvest along quickly.
Scharlau says that early wine estimates seemed to be higher than the final count.
SCHARLAU: After we had the frost really the primary concern at that point was just getting the rest of the grapes in as quickly as possible because we wanted to minimize the dehydration of the grapes and really getting brittle and dropping on the ground which of course becomes bird food rather than great wine. At the end of harvest we did have some real strong sales because our estimates at the beginning of the harvest cycle were really higher than what we experienced going through harvest so we had some people looking for grapes during harvest and I think all in all everybody seemed to be pleased with what they found and what they got.
That’s today’s Fruit Grower Report. I’m Greg Martin on the Northwest Ag Information Network.
