With the year coming to a close and the 2024 wines all having completed fermentation we wanted to take a moment to give you an update of where those wines currently are in their journey. Take a look behind the scenes at what the winery and vineyard teams have been up to these past few months as we prepare to close out the 2024 season.
Ildo, our Vineyard Manager, and his team have been hard at work over the past two months preparing the vineyard for its winter slumber and ensuring that the vines are in the best position to fare the winter. Grape vines go dormant over the winter months and wake back up in the Spring living off of the nutrients and energy that they stored up over the growing season.
Throughout November and December our Vineyard team has been focused on a few main projects—preparing the vineyards for the winter months ahead, by movement and any trellis work necessary, preparing for our new planting in the Spring and in the last week or so beginning winter pruning.
If you have driven along Oregon Road just east of the Tasting Room in the last few weeks you may have noticed quite a bit of activity. The guys have been hard at work removing roughly 2.5 acres of vines from our House Vineyard in preparation for a new grape varietal that we will be planting in the spring—more to come on that in 2025 so stay tuned!
Over the last week or so the winter pruning has begun. Winter Pruning is done to prepare the vines for the upcoming growing season and ensure a healthy, fruitful vine in the growing season to come. This process will continue throughout the coming weeks until all 54 acres have been pruned in preparation for the 2025 growing season. It is the largest single vineyard task of the year and takes roughly 40 hours per acre per person.
With the year coming to a close we are closing out the 2024 Harvest in the winery. All of the Suhru & Lieb 2024 white wines have finished fermentation and some are waiting for fining (heat and cold stability) and filtration before bottling, which will begin towards the end of January 2025. Looking to our red wines, the 2024 reds have just finished malolactic fermentations and have begun their barrel aging. Our 2023 reds have started to come out of barrels, both to make room for the 2024 reds and to begin preparation for bottling in the New Year.
As we prepare to begin bottling the 2024 White and Rosé wines and 2023 Reds beginning in January, the team is hard at work developing and refining the blends for the wines soon to be bottled. From mid January to the end of April, the winery team will be bottling away—preparing our 2024 white and rosé wines for Spring release and bottling 2023 reds which will then be moved to our warehouse for bottle aging from for a few months to a few years before release. Keep an eye out this Spring for a number of new releases!
