Ah, high summer.  Long, hot, sunny days.  Tasting rooms full of happy vacationers.  Rosé flying out of the warehouse.  While it feels like the summer season has just kicked off, the looming reality for us at Lieb is that harvest (our unofficial start of fall) is less than 2 months away.  Last year, we picked Pinot Blanc on Sept 1.  The year before, Sept 12.  This year we anticipate our first pick day to fall somewhere in between.  So for this “behind the scenes” post, I’ll explain what needs to happen in the vineyard, at the winery and on the business side in the 8 or so weeks (ah!) between now and then.

First up – pre-harvest vineyard prep.  If you haven’t checked out Alicia’s “Wine, Illustrated” blog post from last week and are at all curious about how much work goes into farming a vineyard each season, I encourage you to take a look.  It’s pretty astonishing.  Our 84 acres of vines are tended by a crew of 8 guys, and given the amount of work they accomplish on an annual basis, I’d confidently say they’re some of the hardest working laborers in the industry.

From winter pruning to fall harvest, a minimum of 16 manual operations are completed in our vineyard each season. Tasks like lifting and dropping the catch wires, thinning shoots and installing bird nets – done by hand for each and every vine down each and every row.  Ultimately what that equates to is over 26,000 hours of work and 1,700 miles traversed by our crew in a given year – a distance covering NYC to Denver, CO!

And, that doesn’t factor in our mechanical operations, or how many times they pass through the vineyard on tractors to spray, mow, weed, etc.!

Needless to say, vineyard work is a beast.  With a heavy portion of it happening between now and harvest.

At this stage, the guys have long completed winter pruning – cutting back the vines from last season to help control growth for this season.  Since then, they’ve removed the dead brush, tied down the canes (or big branches) that didn’t get pruned, made vineyard repairs, lifted catch wires and tucked the shoots (or small branches) into them, to make sure they grow straight up.  Last week, we started leaf plucking, the process of pulling off the leaves around the grape clusters to better expose them to the sun.  That work will take us straight through this week, and soon, we’ll do what’s called “green harvest.”  This is the identification and removal of immature grape bunches on the vine in order to direct the sun’s energy to the riper bunches.  Finally, in August, we’ll pass through the vineyard three more times prior to harvest to first remove “unclean” fruit (bunches that don’t meet our standards), then to install the nets to protect the grapes from deer and a last time to lift the nets right before we start picking.  Phew.

Vineyard work is tedious, constant and often grueling.  But if you asked our vineyard foreman, Jildo, who’s been with us now for 19 seasons, he’ll also tell you that it’s rewarding.  He takes pride in the fruit that they send to the winery each year, and all of their efforts are ultimately reflected in the bottle.  Between now and then, though, you can find him and his crew deep in the vineyard pulling 70 hour work weeks.  Man do we appreciate their efforts!

In the back office and at the winery, there’s an equal amount of preparation that needs to be done – although not with physical labor – in order to get ready for harvest.

Russell manages the work that has to happen at our winery in terms of cleaning tanks and hoses and readying the “crush pad,” which is the term used to describe the space and equipment dedicated to accepting the fruit that comes in from the vineyard and turning it into juice.  So, machines like the conveyor lift, the destemmer and the press.  Since August is dedicated to pre-harvest prep at the winery, the goal every year is to try to ensure that we’re not distracted by any bottling or packaging needs during this time.  We’ll be filling a stockpile of boxes and kegs for the remainder of this month in order to avoid that scenario.

In the back office, I manage the production planning.  This is the process by which Russell, our CEO, Richard, and I (along with our full team of managers) take a close look at inventory and past sales figures to determine exactly which and how much of each wine we’ll produce in September.  For example, if we produced 1,400 cases of Pinot Blanc last season but have only sold through half of it, we may decide to produce less for this year in order to avoid a surplus (we can do this by selling off the extra grapes to other local producers who source fruit instead of grow their own).  Let’s say, on the flip side, we produced 2,000 cases of Rosé last year and expect to be woefully sold out of it well before the end of summer.  In that case, we may decide to increase production this year either by not selling any of the grapes that go into our rosé or by redirecting grapes used in other wines towards rosé (i.e. make less Cabernet Franc so that we can use those grapes for rosé).

In two weeks, our entire team will participate in an all-afternoon production planning meeting where we examine and debate the merits of each and every wine in our Lieb Cellars and Bridge Lane portfolios and decide right then and there which wines stay, which wines (if any) get discontinued or skipped for this season, which wines we make more of and which we make less of.  It’s a raucous, productive meeting.  I look forward to it every year.

But from that meeting, Russell and I go to work.  He establishes a detailed harvest plan – laying out exactly how many tons of fruit we’ll bring in for each wine and approximately when to pick each lot, in order to match ripeness to the style we like to achieve (i.e. a light and high acid wine, pick sooner!).  I draft a “dry goods” buying plan, budget and timeline – outlining how many of each bottle, label, cap, box, bag, keg, etc. we need to buy, from which vendor, for how much and when, given all of the varying lead times.  One mistake in the execution of either of our plans can cost our business A LOT.  Russell could not harvest enough fruit for a particular wine and make us short, for example.  Or I could order the wrong amount of labels and cause a major bottling issue come January.

July and August are crunch time.  Our vineyard crew, Russell and I need to be on our A game.  A successful harvest requires hard work, cooperation, planning and flawless execution.

I’ve been with Lieb for three harvests so far, and I’m proud to say that our team has rocked each and every one.  Here’s hoping this fourth one goes smoothly as well.  I have no doubts it will.

Raise a glass and wish us luck!

Cheers,

Ami Opisso

General Manager & Certified Sommelier, Lieb Cellars