Harvest Begins at Aridus July 14th
On July 14 we started harvest, with Chardonnay from Chiricahua Ranch Vineyards. This will be our only wine in the 2026 vintage not from our own estate vineyards. Although we’ve been having hot weather, it’s now gotten the coolest it’s been in a couple of weeks. The monsoon season started last week. If you’ve never experienced a monsoon in our part of the world, it’s quite dramatic (and they generally don’t harm the vineyards.) Our monsoons are like a focused storm, localized, often seeming to be a downpour from a single cloud, sometimes even with hail….and then…it’s over! It can be perfectly dry a mile away from where it’ll be dumping two to four inches of monsoon-rain.
This is winemaker Jef Stebben’s 30th harvest, and he says there is still a lot to learn!
We started picking these grapes at 3 a.m. and finished at 10:30 a.m.; the grapes arrived at the winery at 11:15 a.m. As of this writing, the grapes are now pressed and resting in Tank 7. Our Defranceschi JP 50 is a new press for us and this was its first load of white grapes. So far there are really delicious aromas of peaches, apricots and stone fruit in the Chardonnay. Scott is super excited!
The next grapes to be harvested will probably be viognier from our estate vineyard. This could change because of the weather. The monsoons have a different impact on each varietal: picture a boatload of rain coming down on one side of the vineyard and the other side not impacted at all. Some varietals will take on more water than others which can dilute the characters that we work so hard for.
One of the unique aspects of growing grapes in Arizona is the factor of the monsoons. Sometimes a monsoon can break over you while you’re picking, but today we have excellent satellite mapping which predicts with great accuracy if a major storm is coming through. We take advantage of this technology, but we add our own ‘secret sauce,’ also considering our own superstitions and gut feelings about the weather. For example, our vineyard manager Moises feels that the weather in his hometown in Mexico always mirrors our weather. He’s usually accurate, by the way. This said, it is difficult to predict the weather. When you look at a map of our area you see how the topography consists of many different basins with different sizes and orientations. That means we’re operating in a number of different microclimates separated by mountains. Twenty miles away the weather is often entirely different.
It comes down to difficult decision making sometimes: if there’s a good chance of rain, we may wait a day to start harvesting. Or if it rains hard during the night, then the next morning we have to decide whether to pick or wait for the vineyard to dry out.
We’re often asked, what happens to the skins and stems after the grapes have been pressed? We move those to a compost pile (far from our crushpad.) We don’t let anything go to waste and this compost pile has been ‘working’ (i.e. biodegrading) for a number of years. The material
may go back out to be disked into the vineyard soil; we haven’t decided yet. It's great for gardens as well.
We do a lot of work in the vineyard to ensure that the fruit is as healthy as it can be. Right before harvest we go through to ‘leaf,’ or strip leaves to allow sunlight in. It’s a tricky balance; we want to give the fruit some light exposure, but we don’t want to risk sunburn.
We’ll be out in the vineyard sampling and tasting grapes in a few days; Right now, we’re thinking that the next grapes to come in will either be malbec or viognier.
Usually we harvest white grapes before reds, but this year we might be doing viognier (which is white) at the same time as the malbec (which is red). I am watching the merlot as well.
One aspect of winemaking in the desert is wildlife. Wild javelina and gopher snakes often make an appearance. So far this year we’ve welcomed a tarantula, a gopher snake, and a tortoise.
Tarantulas show up when there’s been a lot of rain. When we pulled our press out onto the crush pad, out popped a six-inch tarantula (see picture). Tom carefully moved it over off the crushpad, but the intrepid fellow (girl?!) came back several times to hang out near the press.
We’re expecting to see some tortoises next. When the red grapes show up, the tortoises emerge. They track the red grapes to the area near the hopper where some berries inevitably fall out onto the ground as the de-stemmer does its work. Two years ago we had one visiting tortoise; last year we had two; maybe we’ll have a family this year? We’ll let you know.