NOET Vineyard had a lovely run from 2015 until this year. We have had a very robust vineyard from the beginning, with our first harvest being 500 lbs of Cabernet Sauvignon grapes just one year after planting the vines in early 2014. The harvest grew to 1,100, 1,600, and 2,000 lbs in subsequent years, and it has held steady between on or about 2,000 lbs per harvest ever since.
Our vineyard was initially managed by Sal Captain and was taken over by CVC after Sal decided to focus on his vineyard. Unfortunately, for reasons you may all know, in early 2024, CVC decided no longer to provide their services to the Lamorinda area.
That was very unfortunate indeed and very costly for us. The vineyard manager we chose was not up to the task. Several issues did not go right. The initial pruning was a deviation from the cane pruning, and there were way too many branches left in each vine; the spraying conducted during the summer was sub-par, and the canopy management was done incorrectly, leaving a lot of grapes exposed to direct sun, resulting raisins.
Since our vineyard benefits from the Moraga Gap and we get a lot of fog, we have not needed to water our grapes that much over the years, only a few times during the summer. One could argue that we did not give our grapes enough water this year. But since our neighbor, Captain Vineyards, tends to have a similar limited watering regime and their Cabernet harvest in 2024 was normal, that most likely was not the main issue but could have contributed to the results.
Since we were traveling a lot during the summer and had earlier learned to trust CVC in management, we did not expect this to happen. Unfortunately, we realized the full scope of the damage too late in the summer to be able to do anything about it.
The result was a significant amount of powdery mildew and raisins. We had to drop over 3/4 of the harvest, and we were able to collect only about 400 lbs of grapes.
This was a hard lesson to learn. We can only blame ourselves for not being more proactive about our vineyard and its management. We will be much more careful in the future as we consider any help we need on our vineyard.
