Well it’s been quite a year! We spent early spring adding nutrients to all the vines, especially our one and a half acres of new cabernet clones and petit verdot. Bulmaro Montes, our vineyard manager with over 30 years of experience mostly spent developing Joseph Phelphs premier vineyards, watched our vines very carefully and “cane pruned” only to allow a limited amount of grape clusters to form. This forces the vine to produce the highly concentrated grape juice that makes great cab. After watching the weather for two months in April and May to make sure that we could protect the new buds from any frosty nights, we breathed a sigh of relief when May 31st finally came and warm June days loomed on the horizon.

SURPRISE!!!! We were hit with the coldest and wettest June most any of us could ever remember. The vines thought winter was back. The resulting effect was to create a situation where the grapes can develop unevenly (some early and some late) even in the same cluster. We literally had to look at each vine individually, fertilizing some, watering others and reducing the fruit and managing the leaf canopy. It’s this type of labor intensive care that separates the “crus” from the “Premier Gran Crus”. When you have to get up at two am to turn the water off at Treva’s Vineyard, you realize you are really a farmer! The excitement we feel each time we taste our 2002 wines and especially when our friends taste and then go “WOW”, makes us strive for a quality of wine that does not compromise.

The hot weather finally hit in September and the sugars in the grapes (brix) went wild. Bulmaro said that this is the year we have to be patient because you will have high sugar fruit that still is not ripe. Mark Herold told us the ph was still too low which indicated immature fruit. Around the valley a lot of vineyards were harvesting, sometimes reds along with the whites, but we were sitting, watering and watching. The main danger is that when the weather is so hot you get a lot of shriveling and you end up with raisins not grapes. We watered through the hot weather and finally in the last two weeks of September the hot weather broke. We love those cool foggy nights and moderately warm days in the 80’s, and so do the grapes.

Hang time was the operative phrase and we were hanging. The grapes were hanging on the vines and we were hanging around the vineyard, but September didn't’t hang around so we welcomed October and Fall to Napa Valley. In 2002, we harvested Treva’s Vineyard on September 23rd. This year on October 11th, we were ready and this beautiful vineyard yielded five tons of tiny intense cabernet berries and off Treva and I went to the crush facility in Napa to deliver our precious grapes. Let me tell you, one drives very carefully dragging a trailer loaded with tons of fruit that will become our special reserve wine. The week of October 13th continued our story of beautiful warm days and cool nights. Our samples sent to ETS testing lab in St. Helena told us Sunday the 19th was the day for the “Lake Vineyard.” The characteristic spiciness that we experienced last year seemed even more intense this year, so we are very excited to taste the wine in a month or so.

6am came early and Joel and the crew started picking at first light. Treva and I were frantically picking out leaves and other foreign objects as fast as they were dumped into the bins. Four hours and ten half ton bins later we were headed to our custom crush facility with a load of beautiful blue black grapes. Two down, and one vineyard to go. Mark Herold called the next day effusive about the first barrel samples of the hillside vineyard. “Another Monster” he said, can’t wait to taste the next two.

We are now almost to November and the weather miraculously has turned very hot. Just what Bulmaro wanted. He kept saying that this year we have to be patient, so we waited, tested and waited. Finally on October 27th, he called and said tomorrow’s the day. Early Tuesday October 28th, we descended on the beautiful walled Jake’s Creek Vineyard. We loaded up five tons of perfectly mature luscious fruit and off we went again to Napa. The final total for 2003, twelve tons of Cabernet French Clone, with unbelievable flavors. This will translate into about 800 cases of wine. We have finished the fermentation and all our fruit is now wine, sitting in their beautiful new French Oak barrels, becoming WOW!

Mike Harris
November 23, 2003