wine harvest | Ram's Gate Winery Ramblings

Wednesday, September 23rd – certainly not a date we would have guessed for the final day of Harvest 2015. But with a few tons of Estate Grenache, Grenache Blanc and Syrah, the last few bins of grapes arrived on our crushpad.

“In total, we brought in slightly less than last year,” says Assistant Winemaker Jesse Fox. But quality more than made up for quantity, with beautiful, tiny berries and lovely flavor.

While harvest has come to a close, the 2015 vintage as a whole has only just begun. Several ferments continue to thrive in tank, and after the sweet juice converts its sugars into alcohol, the wine will be pressed and “barreled down” to age for between eleven and eighteen months.

Estate Grenache-Syrah 088

From all of us at Ram’s Gate Winery, cheers! We can’t wait to share the fruits of this harvest with you.

The beautiful thing about receiving fruit from a vineyard called “El Diablo” – besides the beautiful fruit itself – is the way that the name itself makes everything it touches more mysterious, more romantic.

The first of our 2015 Chardonnays to be harvested, El Diablo arrived on our crushpad late in the morning of August 19th. The seven tons were separated by clone: six bins (3 tons) of Wente clone, four bins (2 tons) of Robert Young and four bins (2 tons) of Montrachet.

These three clones, picked simultaneously, will be combined in the press, co-fermented, aged and bottled as one. “It’s almost like our own Ulises Valdez Diablo clonal selection,” says Winemaker Jeff Gaffner. “It’s the ‘greater than the sum of its parts’ argument.”

El Diablo Vineyard Chardonnay – Wente Clone

The Wente clone has “great complexity and mouthfeel,” Jeff Gaffner says, “with really cool phenolics in the mouth. The Wente is very aromatic, with lemon oil and citrus.”

El Diablo Vineyard Chardonnay – Robert Young Clone

The Robert Young, he says, has more green fruit. “It tends to have green apple, that lemon oil and citrus again, but with a higher acidity and lower pH.”