Fresh wines become more available as we hit mid grape harvest season

KEUKA PARK, N.Y. (WROC) — The grape harvest season is now in full swing. Overall, Adam Folts, who is the co-owner of Vineyard View Winery, says the grape season was fairly good this year. However, that doesn’t necessarily mean that there weren’t some bumps in the road along the way.

“We had a little bit of drought where we started to see some vine stress. We were concerned at one point about maybe dropping some fruit, especially the wine grapes to help the vine stay healthy. But we got rain right when we needed it,” he says.

Now that it is harvest season, grape farmers will start mostly hand picking their crop, but they are not the only ones who spend their time in the vineyards.

“This time of year, we are keeping track of sugars, acid, PH on the fruit as well flavor and texture development to determine when we want to bring it in for winemaking,” says Paige Vinson, who is the winemaker at Vineyard View Winery. “Most of our time is spent in the vineyard actually and then prepping the cellar for grapes to be ready to come in and crush.”

Once the harvest season has concluded, most may think that there is a ton of work that needs to be done. However, that is not the case for both grape farmers and wine makers.

“Grapes kind of put themselves to bed. The only thing that we try to do is we try to make sure that the canopy is clean and once that fruit is gone, it ripens off the wood so we have crop for next year,” Folts says. “We don’t really have a way to hold onto fruit or to make more wine throughout the year. We do almost all of our production during harvest,” says Vinson.

Although harvesting usually ends at the beginning of November, Vineyard View WInery will remain open every day but Tuesday year round.

Click here to learn more about Vineyard View Winery.

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