Grape Harvest Winds Down in Napa

(W&V) - Anthony Truchard of Truchard Vineyards summed up this year’s harvest in Napa Valley succinctly: “Fat, fast and furious.”

Truchard, whose family farms in the Carneros AVA, said, “Mother Nature was again very generous to Napa Valley in 2013. Both the yields and quality exceeded expectations. With a dry spring and summer and a bit warmer temperatures, everything ripened very quickly making it a very fast and compacted harvest — with the exception of one day of rain, one Saturday and a few Sundays — we have been picking grapes pretty much every day since Aug. 28 at Truchard.”

 Harvest started at Truchard with a small pick of Pinot Noir on Aug. 29. “At the third week of October, we are about 85% finished and plan to finish up this week or shortly after with Cabernet Sauvignon, Cabernet Franc and Petit Verdot. Thankfully we have had a relatively dry and warm October. Yields were higher than expected across the board. All the grapes looked very clean, healthy and free from disease. We did have a bit of shriveling in the hillsides that we attribute to the dry spring as well as the dry north wind that came at the beginning of October.”

While all the growers that Wines & Vines spoke to from Carneros to Calistoga remarked on the early timing and praised the quality of their fruit, not all experienced high yields. The following are further reports from Napa Valley’s varied vineyard districts. Napa County produced more than 181,000 tons of wine grapes in 2012's record harvest that produced a crop with a total value of more than $656 million. According to Wines Vines Analytics, the county is home to nearly 1,000 wineries and 733 growers.