The 2010 Harvest at SAAM Mountain Vineyards

By Callie Coetzee, Viticulturist at SAAM

Growing conditions

We had a great winter with an above average rainfall in our area. The rain came almost every second week and continued until the middle of November 2009.

From the middle of November until we started to harvest, we had little or no rain. These conditions are great for healthy ripening of our grapes.

Our harvest started out a bit latter than the previous year and that is mainly due to the cooler growing conditions in the early and middle section of the growing season.  Our Red grapes also ripen slower than in normally.

The Harvest

This vintage will be remembered for a ‘unique’ reason. White grapes ripened at the normal time while Red grapes where marking time. Utopia for planning Cellar activity! This gave us the opportunity to harvest more than 90 % of all our White grapes and having to only crushing about 15 % of our Red grapes.

This will give us the luxury of spending most of our time in the second part of harvesting exclusively to the Red grapes which inevitably makes quality planning and selection so much easier.

Unfortunately the crop will be slightly down on the previous year. At this stage the expectation is between 6 and 8 % lower than 2009. For our dry land vineyards rain is a blessing, however this year the lower crop is due to the wind and rainy conditions we experienced during the flowering period of some of the cultivars.

Chenin Blanc, Shiraz and Cabernet Sauvignon will be more or less the same as 2009. Chardonnay, Pinotage and Semillon are estimated to be down by between 15 and 20%. The rest of our region expects to be down by between 15 and 20 %.

A cooler growing season is always good for wine quality. Cooler conditions will give slower ripening and in Red grapes it will give riper tannins and flavors at a lower sugar level and also a lower wine alcohol. Red wine color is also excellent in a cooler growing season.

On the White wine side the Sauvignon Blanc shows a lot of greener, grassy flavors moving towards slightly riper fig flavors. With the skill and assistance of our Winemaking team, no doubt the 2010 wines will be something to look forward to! We will have more news later, until then, all the best.

Tags: Harvest diary, Saam, south africa

This entry was posted on Friday, March 5th, 2010 at 8:00 am and is filed under News. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.