Speaker: We are farmers so we are very much up at the mercy of weather. This vintage is shaping up beautifully. We had a normal weather, so that resulted in a normal food set for us and good grapes. We are expecting a good sized crop this year. The growing season has been ideal, we had a lot of sunshine, a lot of warm sunny days, and every couple weeks a nice rain shower. So in our area we do not have irrigation. So we rely very much on the natural rainfall to supply water to the Vines. On the West Coast on the other hand, those areas like California and Washington State in general, are all irrigated, and the reason is, this they get very little rainfall. It's almost like a desert growing condition. So without irrigation, in many parts of the West Coast they couldn't grow grapes.
In our area we generally do get nice natural rainfall, and so irrigation is not needed, and this is very similar to Northern Europe where irrigation is outlawed, and the reason it is in Northern Europe not permitted, is because there is a temptation of over crop the Vines, and that results in diluted or neutral styled wines. So by outlawing irrigation, the Europeans feel they can control the quality better, and we follow that same philosophy. So our vineyards really are, basically just subject to the natural rainfall, which normally is ideal. Occasionally, we'll have a vintage where we get more than normal rainfall, or another minutes we'll have less than normal rainfall and all those things will have an impact on the flavors and the vintage of wine.
You'll find similar vintage variations in Northern Europe, where the weather will effect the flavors of the wine and I think that's what makes the Finger Lakes wines very interesting, similar to Northern European wines, in that the vintages, the flavors, the quality, the style, thus change from year to year.
Whereas in warm climate regions the vintage variation is less pronounced. Here in California, when you have hot sunny days everyday, and you're efficiently irrigating the wines, there really isn't that big a difference from one vintage to the next vintage, but in Northern Europe and in Finger Lakes, there is these vintage variation, which really I think it's more interest to the wines, because they make you change the flavors from year to year. So we are really excited about the quality. You know right now we are in early August, so it's too early for us to predict the actual quality. September and October, key months for us, weather wise. And traditionally we a period in the Finger Lakes, through October, which we call Indian summer, which is a spell of hot dry weather, which is ideal for these later ripening varieties, like Riesling, and it allows us to hang them, and get more maturity, more flavors, more complexity through the end of October, and sometimes we are not thinking until early November.
So that additional hang time results in higher quality wines and our micro climate here extends our growing season by pushing off all the frost. We have steep slopes here, so what happens on a frosty fall morning or evening that whole day rolls off the hillside, and is replaced by warm air from the lake. These lakes are several hundred feet deep, so they moderate the surrounding hillside. All in terms of winter temperature, allowing us to grow these tender European wine grades here in New York, and in terms of frost free days, growing season, that extends the growing season, and frost period even a few degrees can mean a difference between a killing frost and beautifully green vines, where we can leave the fruit and let that wine mature for extra couple of weeks, and that could mean a difference between a gold medal winning wine, and neighbor that has a less desirable site or vintages, micro climate, they may have to pick a few weeks earlier, because they got frosted, those wines are not going to be as full-bodied as glass.
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