Wine grape harvest under way in Sonoma

GLEN ELLEN — The North Coast grape harvest kicked off its earliest start in recent memory Friday morning as workers fanned out into Sonoma Valley vineyards to pick prized pinot noir grapes in the pre-dawn darkness.

With bright headlamps and hooked harvest knives, a dozen workers sliced through a Glen Ellen vineyard with speed and precision, relieving the vines of their glistening grape clusters to usher in the annual ritual known in Wine Country simply as crush.

Vineyard manager Chris Bowen said he can’t remember an earlier start to the harvest in his long career tending the 40 acres of vineyards that surround Robert Hunter Winery.

“If it’s not the earliest it’s one of the earliest harvests I’ve seen in 25 years,” said Bowen, bundled in a fleece against the morning chill.

The unusually warm weather, dry spring and light crop all combined to speed the harvest of what has long been one of the Sonoma Valley’s earliest ripening vineyards. The harvest even snuck up on those watching it most closely.

“It definitely surprised us,” said Bob Iantosca, winemaker at Gloria Ferrer winery in Sonoma. “This is very early.”

Iantosca said he knew the grapes were getting close to perfection last week as their colors turned from pink to a lustrous purple. The warmth of this past week pushed the sugars in the grapes up to the ideal levels for making sparkling wines.

“We really feel like we’re hitting it good this year,” said Iantosca, who will blend the pinot noir grapes from Glen Ellen with chardonnay into premium sparkling wines. “The fruit looks gorgeous.”

Most Sonoma wineries are still weeks away from picking, as grapes bound for most table wines are allowed to ripen further. The three-month harvest starts as a trickle and builds to a flood that will wash into hundreds of North Coast wineries through October.

Those who make it all possible are men like Alejandro Escobar. The 23-year-old deli worker raced up and down the dusty vineyard rows attacking the vines with ferocity as he joked with his fellow workers.

All are natives of Michoacán, Mexico, he said. His grandfather, Rudy Rodriguez, has worked for Robert Hunter Winery for 30 years.

“I don’t like it so much,” Escobar said as he bent over to lift a gray plastic bin full of grapes and haul it to the tractor waiting nearby. “It’s hard work, but I gotta do it.”

Escobar, a student at Santa Rosa Junior College who wants to be a mechanic, said he expected to make about $150 for the day’s work. Since everyone on the crew will be paid equally based on the weight of the crop, Escobar said they work fast and try hard not to leave any clusters behind.

Wearing a protective glove on his left hand and holding his orange handled knife in his right, Escobar cleaned a vine of its grapes in seconds.

“You grab the grapes with this hand, and go pop, pop, pop with the knife,” he explained as the clusters fell into the bin.

While the warmer Napa Valley has traditionally begun picking sparkling wine grapes before Sonoma, this is the second year in a row that Gloria Ferrer has started harvest before Wine Country’s traditional early bird, Mumm Napa. Winemaker Rob McNeill said Mumm expects to begin harvesting late next week at the earliest.

The Robert Hunter vineyard seems to be a bit of an anomaly. The vineyard sits in “a little banana belt” east of Sonoma Mountain where the fog rarely reaches, Iantosca said.

Nick Frey, president of the Sonoma County Winegrape Commission, said he was little surprised to hear harvest was beginning.

“But there is such great variation from vineyard to vineyard that that can happen,” Frey said.

Most sparkling wine producers still say they are a week or two away from starting to pick, Frey said. “I don’t think it’ll be a rush to harvest,” he said.

Even Iantosca predicts that once he’s done with the Glen Ellen vineyard on Tuesday, he’ll have a week or more break until grapes in the Gloria Ferrer’s cooler Carneros vineyards are ready.