How Matt Decides When to Harvest

How Matt Decides When to Harvest

Every vintage comes down to one decision that can’t be undone: the day the grapes come off the vine. Pick too early, and the wine never develops the flavor we want it to have. Wait too long, and we risk losing the balance that makes a wine worth drinking in the first place. There’s no redo. Once the fruit is picked, that’s the vintage.

So how does Matt decide when that day is for each varietal and block?

Being There, Constantly

For Matt, the process starts long before harvest season even begins. He’s out in the vineyards throughout the growing season, working alongside our vineyard managers on farming decisions well before there’s any fruit to assess. By the time harvest approaches, he’s walked those same blocks enough times to truly understand where the fruit is headed, not just where it happens to be on any single day.

That hands-on presence isn’t optional in his mind, it’s the only way to really understand a vineyard’s trajectory. Watching how a block ripens over a growing season tells him things that a single measurement never could.

The Numbers: Sampling in the Field

When it’s time to start assessing ripeness, Matt does it methodically. For a one-acre block with, say, twelve rows, he’ll walk down one side of the block, cutting a cluster every ten paces or so, alternating left and right, then walk back up a row on the opposite side of the block. By the end, he’s got a bucket of grapes that represents the whole block.

Those samples come back to the winery, where the grapes get crushed and tested for sugar (brix) and pH. As harvest gets closer, juice samples sometimes get sent to a lab to check malic acid too, a data point Matt didn’t used to track but has started paying closer attention to in recent years, since it’s proven to be a useful indicator of ripeness.

The Numbers Don’t Tell the Whole Story

Here’s where it gets more interesting than a spreadsheet. Sometimes the data says a block is ready, sugar and pH sitting right where they should be, but the fruit itself tells a different story. The berries are still hard. The flavor isn’t there yet.

Matt looks for physical signs the numbers can’t capture: the seed starting to separate from the pulp inside the berry, the skin coloring up, the skin beginning to soften. And ultimately, the simplest test of all: does it taste like something?

There’s a specific moment he watches for, when a block goes from tasting like nothing much to suddenly having real flavor and complexity. That moment doesn’t happen at the same sugar level every year, and the reason comes down to how sugar and flavor develop relative to each other. In a warmer vintage, sugar climbs quickly, often outpacing flavor, so the fruit can hit ripe-looking numbers well before it tastes ready. In a cooler vintage, grapes take longer to reach that same sugar level, which gives flavor more time to develop alongside it, so the two are more likely to arrive together, often at a lower brix than a warm year would produce. Some years that flavor moment shows up at 22 brix. Other years, 23 or 24. There’s no fixed number to chase, only the fruit telling you when it’s ready.

Where Experience Comes In

This is the part that can’t be taught from a manual. The sugar keeps climbing whether the fruit is flavor-ready or not, and Matt has to weigh the rising brix against what the fruit character and flavor is telling him. Pick based on sugar alone, and you might end up with technically ripe fruit that doesn’t taste like anything. Wait purely for peak flavor, and the acid and sugar levels can drift out of the range needed for a balanced wine.

Deciding when to pick means holding both of those pressures at once and finding where they meet, rather than optimizing for one and ignoring the other. That balancing act, weighing hard data against something as unmeasurable as flavor, and doing it differently for every block and every vintage, is where years of walking these same rows pays off. There’s no formula that replaces it, just the judgment that comes from having made this exact call, under different conditions, many times before.