2022 Harvest Report

How many bottles of wine do you get from one vine? How many pounds of grapes can you grow per acre? How many clusters of grapes go into each bottle?

These are common questions we hear during our vineyard tours. The answer is always the same: it depends. Some of the most important factors are soil depth and composition, weather during the growing season, and weather during the prior year.

2022 was never predicted to be a bumper crop. Rainy and cloudy conditions during most of 2021 meant the vines couldn’t develop a large potential crop for the following year. (Little known fact: it takes two years to grow a grape crop.) Winter damage during January 2022 killed some of that already-small potential crop. Then, drought conditions during most of July and August 2022 meant that berries were small and weighed less than normal.

Once we started picking the fruit, most farms discovered that their projections of crop size (that were already low) were wrong.  There was even less fruit than we were hoping for.

Each harvest has a heartbreak moment or two, and that was it for 2022: not enough fruit. These issues affected the entire Finger Lakes region, so it wasn’t possible to source additional fruit to make up for the small crop size.

However, the bright spot for this year was the very good quality of the grapes. As you can see from Paul’s smiling face as he was loading Riesling into the press, the wine from 2022 is going to be wonderful! From Pinot Noir to Chardonnay, and Cabernet Franc & Sauvignon to NY-45, we had clean, ripe, flavorful raw material to shepherd into great wine.

You are going to really enjoy the “goldilocks” nature of the 2022 wines—not too much or too little of anything. These wines are going to be “just right,” and we look forward to sharing them with you starting in a few months!