Failure is hard.
When you’ve worked for 20 years developing a wonderful vineyard, and you crash and burn? There are antidepressants that help.
Since we stopped making wine, we’ve tried to find new homes for our grapes. Baaad timing, a world glut of wine and grapes. Reduced consumption, increased production, millions of tons of surplus fruit.
Most established wineries have regular suppliers and are cutting production. So, we try to work with newer wineries. Most have failed and left unpaid bills, some very high.
Since we had only a few buyers for 10% of our crop, we needed to cut expenses to lose less money.
Normally, Bertha, Petro, and I spend hundreds of hours doing 3-4 shoot-thinning passes and leaf pulling so we can avoid pesticides.
It’s expensive.
This year, we decided to skip the first two. I think it would have been ok for many years, just not this one. Early growth was followed by a month of cool, cloudy days and frequent showers. Perfect conditions for Powdery Mildew to run riot. Many growers sprayed fungicides 2-3 times more often, perhaps 12 sprays, and they still had some Mildew problems.
Since most of our most susceptible varieties had no buyers, we wrote those off. But most other varieties also got infections severe enough to damage the leaves’s ability to photosynthesize the phytochemicals that give wine its flavor and aromas. Bland, boring fruit, better than you buy at a supermarket, but not up to our standard.
A couple of varieties that have better resistance did fine. Unfortunately, I haven’t found a buyer for 4 tons of Sémillon, and the others are tiny amounts with no interest.
I had to connect with our few buyers and tell them I wouldn’t sell them fruit; the quality wasn’t to our standards. I told them if they wanted to come pick them, they were free. Sensibly, they declined. Hard to make really good wine from mediocre grapes. There is no demand for mediocre wine. (Although there is some big-name crap at the supermarket.)
The birds are feeding well. If you want to try home winemaking, we have some stuff, free; you pick. Now, not in a week or two. Timing is critical in getting properly ripe fruit, whether it’s a tomato or Sémillon.
