(Another) Year in the Vineyard, Final Installment, October 21, 2010 with Wes Hagen, Clos Pepe

(Another) Year in the Vineyard Week #32 (The Last Weekly Blog for 201) October 15-21, 2010 Wrapping it Up and Looking to the Skies For a harvest that began so quickly behind a strong period of hot weather in late September, the harvest is winding down slowly here in Santa Barbara County.  We would be done, completely done, tomorrow if our production was strictly pinot noir and chardonnay from the Estate, but we also make some wine for our second label, Axis Mundi, from the Ballard Canyon subarea of the Santa Ynez Valley…and we haven’t seen enough heat to push the syrah and grenache fruit into the ‘ripe’ category.  So we press on in the winery (accurate, as we are pressing the last 4 fermenters of Estate pinot noir this morning (Wednesday, October 20th), and then we’ll rack the almost-finished-fermenting chardonnay tomorrow.  At that point the Clos Pepe Estate production will be in the can, finished, which will be a relief in itself.  We will clean all the equipment and tidy the winery, but we will also know that we