Our last vineyard diary post in August looked forward optimistically to a soft landing for the 2022 vintage, hoping for a repeat of the remarkable 2012 vintage with moderate temperatures heading into harvest which August seemed poised to dish up. Unfortunately, that is not the hand that Mother Nature dealt in late August and the first half of September. Rather, we had one of the worst heat waves we’ve ever seen in those critical first few weeks of the harvest period, with our porch thermometer peaking at 118 F one afternoon, and a long string of days in the triple digits, including several days in the 110-115 range, after an otherwise reasonable summer heat-wise. The late heat wave was not what the doctor ordered, but we did the best we could. We were very pleased with the Primitivo that we harvested, which was ripe and some of the cleanest fruit we have ever seen. The brix could not help but creep to the upper 20’s, but the fruit was in excellent condition, and we had no major fires that impacted us. The Barbera was not so fortunate, as it needed to hang longer than the Primitivo into the worst of the heat wave, and its thin skin could not take the heat. We managed to get only a little Barbera off the vines, which was disappointing after a promising start. The Quinta fruit managed the heat okay but was just light in quantity due to some losses to early frost and generally lower yields in the vintage after a couple years of drought. The Touriga from our 2009 and 2020 fields was outstanding, and we were able to get all of this as well as our newer block of Tinta Amarela to waiting clients before fall rain became a problem. We harvested our last bin of Touriga Nacional for an up-and-coming commercial winery on September 24, 2022.

We’d like to thank all of the clients who bought fruit from us in 2022, navigating as always the twists and turns of harvest logistics and weather, and look forward to seeing and maybe even tasting some of the resulting wines some day.

Important Announcement for 2023

We wanted to let our clients and others know that Shaker Ridge will not be selling grapes commercially in 2023. Producing quality wine grapes requires dedicated attention for about 7 months of the year, and we’ve been putting in that dedicated work–vineyard manager and head farmer Elizabeth in particular–for 18 consecutive seasons now. This has been a tremendous journey and the fulfillment of a dream, but it hasn’t come without cost, principally the opportunity cost of all the other things we could have done with that time. We therefore plan to focus on family activities in 2023 and not produce any wine grapes commercially, as we would never want to do the latter to anything other than our highest standards. We’ll make a decision about future vintages in due course.

We’re grateful to family, friends, neighbors, and service providers who have helped us over the years, not the least of which has been many vineyard crews laboring in all kinds of weather–but often hot and dry–to get done what needed to get done when it needed to get done. We are also grateful to the dozens of clients over the years–commercial and home winemakers–who have bought our grapes and made so many memorable wines with them. Your success is our proudest accomplishment.

We would encourage you to check out one of the many other fine El Dorado County grape growers in the El Dorado Wine Grape Growers Association (https://www.eldoradograpes.com), of which we are a longtime member, for your 2023 wine grape needs.

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The 2022 vintage is shaping up as a potentially outstanding one. We had a cool spring and a slow start to summer with memorably pleasant mid-70’s temperatures for the 4th of July. The heat of summer followed, and while triple digits were breached a few times at our site, generally we had highs in the mid- to upper 90’s for an extended period, with characteristic cooling to the low 60’s at night. Of late we even had some cloudy days and, more amazingly, a quarter inch of rain one morning…almost unheard of for our climate in August. Now we are looking at at least a week of upper 80- to low 90-degree highs with our normal low humidity…wonderful ripening weather for the grapes. If this moderate heat can sustain through September, this could be the best vintage since 2012–a year in which we saw highs only in the low 90s for an extended period heading into harvest.

Consistent with the moderate weather, we’re seeing very little evidence of sunburn or raisining in any of our fruit, including relatively highly exposed Barbera clusters. We had completed shoot thinning on our cultivated Barbera blocks relatively late, resulting in less foliage re-growth than usual and very good sun exposure of the fruit. Even the fruit in our few rows of Muscat Canelli, whose skin will brown with high heat, is still yellow-green and looking fantastic as it begins to sugar up.

We are officially in the home stretch now for the vintage, with veraison beginning or well in progress for all of our varietals, and having just deployed the rest of our birdnetting to cover all but the Barbera. The Quinta had been netted 1-2 weeks earlier due to the annual temptation (to the birds) of the early-ripening Tempranillo. While inconvenient for every other operation in the vineyard, the netting seems essential for protecting fruit given birds and indeed all of nature circling for food and water in still overall dry conditions. We have been battling gophers, tree squirrels, ground squirrels, wild turkeys, and song birds in the vineyard for weeks or months, and our local bear is about due to join the fray.

One thing we are not seeing–a relief after the Caldor Fire last year–is any major local fires, though they can appear at any time in the dry conditions. This is not to say that there haven’t been any regional fires–there have been several to our south already–but none that have impacted us for more than a day or two, as Cal Fire has been successful and bringing them under control. We hope that it remains that way.

One of our talented home winemaker clients recently achieved a remarkable trifecta with a Best of Show, Best of Division, and a Best of Class (all for dessert wines) in separate competitions with the same port-style wine made from our Quinta block with 2019 fruit. This block of 5 Iberian varietals has been used in numerous top wines over the years, definitely fulfilling our original vision of showcasing the synergy of varietals in a Portuguese-style port. The yield on this block–a block which is now 17 years old– has been steadily declining, but we’ll be getting what fruit it can yield into the hands of some of our best long-term clients this year.

We still have 1 ton of Barbera and 2 tons of Touriga Nacional available for commitment in half-ton or greater quantities, as well as 250 lbs of Muscat Canelli. Due to frost damage in the region, Foothills grapes are likely to be in short supply, and as noted above, it’s shaping up to be an outstanding vintage. Therefore, we encourage you to secure quality fruit while you can from us or others. Once a given variety of our fruit is fully committed with half-ton or greater orders, we will entertain wait list requests for smaller quantities (as little as 250 lbs), should any fruit remain after our main harvest. We have already established such a wait list for our Primitivo.

We look forward to meeting our clients at harvest, which is likely to be on the early side of normal timing this year, and providing some outstanding fruit.

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The 2022 growing season is well in swing now, as we enjoy unseasonably cool temperatures for a couple days with the official start of summer in less than a week away. It was yet another unique weather pattern in the fall and winter, with an “atmospheric river” storm in late October delivering a big bolus of fall rain, a disappointing pause in precipitation, a delightfully wet period in late December with ample rain and snow, a major pause in precipitation for the rest of winter, an “April miracle” of 4-5 more inches of additional rain. A couple insignificant early June storms capped the choppy rainy season, which in the end provided us probably average rainfall if counting the big October storm, though it’s still officially drought conditions in much of the state. The bigger event for 2022 weather was 1 or 2 frost events in early April and, for some, in May, which will likely significantly decrease the 2022 grape crop from the Sierra Foothills. Frost generally doesn’t kill older vines, but it will kill new shoot growth–which much of the region had as of the first frost (it had been 90 degrees only 2 days before)–and the replacement shoots that a vine puts out in abundance are typically less fruitful. At Shaker Ridge, we had pretty minimum impact of the April frost (and none from the May frost) due to our vineyard’s altitude at “only” ~1500 feet (limiting the cold) and the excellent “air drainage” (cool air is heavier and flows away from a locally elevated site) of our vineyards. The biggest impact was in our Tinta Cao grapes whose buds push early and so were farther along than other varietals when the first frost hit; we’ll see decreased yield in those.

In April, we resumed a grafting project begun in 2021 which will bring additional Tempranillo, Souzao, and Rhone varietals (Grenache, Syrah, and Mourvedre) beginning next year, at least in home winemaker quantities. These came at the expense of former Primitivo vines that were on a different soil type than our main Primitivo block or at the edges of this block. The net effect is that we now have a large block of Primitivo on a relatively uniform soil type–our rocky, red clay loam–and by next season will bring larger quantities of our Iberian/Portuguese varietals, having already expanded our Touriga Nacional and Tinta Amarela offerings–and a new block of Rhone varietals which we’ll likely sell as a field blend for “GSM” blends.

Due to limited time to devote in 2022, we are farming only about 75% of our site, letting some of the Barbera grow untended so that we can focus scarce time and water resources on the rest. The vines have all past through bloom at this point, so have nearly full length shoots and fruit set, and will now be focusing their energies on developing the young berries. We have managed to avoid triple digit temperatures to date, and all looks good in the vineyard. We omitted weed spraying in the vine rows with herbicide this year and saw those quickly fill in, mostly with clover, and we’ll see how that experiment goes as the season progresses.

Again due to limited time to devote, we are looking to simplify harvest logistics in 2022, and so at this time are only committing to half-ton (1000 lb) or greater orders, and have limited quantities of Barbera, Primitivo, Touriga Nacional, and a field blend of Portuguese varietals from our well-decorated Quinta block still available. Speaking of the latter, we recently learned that a home winemaker client won Best of Show honors (in port category) at a top California fair with a port-style wine made from our 2019 Quinta grapes, beating out a double gold single-varietal port entry from the same client made from our 2018 Primitivo grapes. For our part, we earned a gold medal at the El Dorado County Fair (home winemaker competition) with our 2020 “Pandemic Primitivo”.

We look forward to a strong 2022 vintage for our clients.

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Another growing season is now in the record books. This one will be remembered for 3 things: an unusually dry spring, an exceptionally hot summer, and the Caldor Fire. The latter started to our east in August and swept in all directions, most notably leveling the small town of Grizzly Flat. It stretched west through the Fair Play region, up river valleys, until stopped by a dedicated effort by locals and Cal Fire. Foiled coming west, it swept along Highway 50 and over Echo Summit into the Tahoe basin, where it was again stopped by dedicated efforts and, ultimately, more favorable weather. In the end, it scorched over 200,000 acres. Though the fire never got closer than about 8 miles to us, it was close enough, and we certainly saw some smoke over us for a couple weeks, typically in morning. Harvest came fast and furious from there, with the hot weather pushing ripening surprisingly early relative to a normal to slightly late bud burst. As such, we picked most of our fruit by mid-September, and but for one grafted field of Touriga Nacional that carried a heavy crop and so took longer to ripen, with last harvest on October 16, it would have been wrapped up very early this year.

In the end, we picked wine grapes for 5 commercial wineries and about 20 home winemakers, selling out of most of our varietals in, what was for many growers, a light harvest year. The fruit seemed to be of high quality, and we look forward to tasting, at some point in the future, the fruits of our labors in the form of finished wine. We thank our clients as always for their good communication, flexibility around harvest, and on-time pickups that make hectic harvest days manageable, and our good neighbor for helping out with the forklift as he has for years.

In 2021 we harvested our first cabernet sauvignon, having grafted over just a few rows last year, and look forward to seeing what quality of cabernet is possible from our site. Though our grafting project for Rhone varietals was not as successful as hoped, we do have a few vines established of Syrah, Grenache, and Mouvedre that will provide the budwood for a more concerted future effort.

After literally half a dozen separate rain storms in September and October that yielded only 1 inch of rain among them, we enjoyed (vicariously–we were out of town!) an “atmospheric river” on October 23-24 that dumped approximately 5 inches of rain on our site and much greater quantities at higher elevations. The local vegetation finally got a drink, our local river and streams finally got a little flow, and we hope that this is the start of a decent wet season for us, as we really need it.

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In our last Vineyard Diary, we remarked on the cool and pleasant (if dry) late spring we had enjoyed, and the pleasant scents of bloom. That picture is now a distant memory, and as we head into the homestretch for harvest 2021, we reflect back on a summer that will go down as one of the hottest in memory. Each summer, it’s rarely a question of whether if we’ll hit triple digit temperatures, but rather when, how often, and for how long. The answers are “yes, often, and 3-4 days each”. Typically there are pleasant stretches with highs in the 80s during, and a day with a high in the low 90s would be typical.

We are now staring down the barrel of our SEVENTH foray into triple digits on our site this summer. The breaks forecast in between these heatwaves have often evaporated as the time got closer, with low 90’s becoming mid-90s, then back again to the 100s. Our worst couple surges in July took us up in the 110 F range, which is baking, as the south-facing side of our tall blackberry bushes near the Quinta can attest. For the most part our vines have hung in there remarkably well, with an earlier start to irrigation necessitated by the dry spring, and we’ve never really been able to let up on regular irrigation due to the excess heat. About the only positive thing we can say about the weather is that we haven’t gone more than about 4 days at a stretch in the 100’s. We lost some Barbera in an already light crop to sunburn from those early very hot heat waves, and those clusters will simply be removed or fall on their own accord by harvest time. There is ample healthy fruit left, and nothing is likely to hurt these “survivors”. Overall, we’re in very good shape heading into harvest.

Our Primitivo had a a reasonable fruit set, and we kept to our plan of lightening the load to assure the vines were in balance, though it seemed that our focus to removing or grafting vines toward the back of our vineyard has been successful in providing a uniform, balanced, and healthy crop on the front part. The Primitivo is fully netted and just biding time till harvest, which will likely be in early September. Moreover, we have an experimental block in which we are trying different fruit dropping strategies and harvest times to determine impact on the resulting wine.

Our newly grafted Touriga vines (last year) are very vigorous and carrying a generous crop, which we are more than half-way through dropping in advance of netting. Our newly grafted Tinta Amarela vines began veraison early than expected and are also carrying a fine crop.

So far this season, there have been no local fires, though we had a couple days of smoky air over the weekend from distant fires, and were happy to see that blow away. We hope it stays away.

We still have a few tons of Barbera, half a ton of Primitivo, and about 1.5 tons of Touriga available for sale from the upcoming 2021 harvest; all other varietals are sold out with no possibility of wait list. Please see our “Grower Update” tab for up-to-date availability and pricing.

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Bloom is in the air and has been for the last 7-10 days. This is the inconspicuous beginning of fruit set from barely visible but pleasantly perfume-emitting flowers throughout the vineyard. It also marks the beginning of the end of the period of rapid shoot elongation that follows bud burst as the vines shift gears toward fruit development.

With the extremely dry April (0.2″ of rain) and May (0.3″ of rain), the top layers of soil are about as dry as they’ve ever been for this date for us, so short-cycle irrigation was begun to attempt to recharge the upper soil layers and provide regular water for our blocks on the Primitivo side with some young grafts. We got away with a single round of mowing of the grasses and clover between rows, and even that single pass left us with something like a dust bowl. We have never seen the grass and weed growth so weak, but we’re not complaining…it’s made spring maintenance a little easier, and lower weed burden means the weeds will use less of our scarce water vs. the vines as we move into the summer.

Shoot thinning was a major, labor-intensive operation as always, and it was only because of the help of a dedicated hired crew that we were able to complete this for the bulk of the vineyard in the last 3 weeks, with a little clean up work in the Quinta and last year’s grafted block to follow within the next few days. Beyond that, regular spraying for prevention of powdery mildew continues.

Apart from the dryness, it’s been an amazingly pleasant May on the farm, with cool daytime highs in the 70s to low 80s for much of May. It appears that we will not make it to June without a sudden foray into the 90’s predicted for the long Memorial Day weekend and extending into next week. However, we knew that the heat could not be restrained forever. Fortunately, much of the labor-intensive work will have been completed by then, and irrigation will begin in earnest.

We still have 1.5 tons or more of each of our main varietals Primitivo, Barbera, and Touriga available for reservation, though we do not expect that that will remain the case for long as commercial wineries begin to see the light at the end of the COVID tunnel. We are now sold out of all of our less abundant varietals, though our production estimates are usually conservative, and so we can entertain wait list requests for any of those.

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Vintage 2021 is in full swing as budburst began to ripple over the vineyard on April 1, reaching the Barbera by April 10 and the Primitivo and Touriga by April 20. We once again had miserly–well, zero–early fall rain, with the first autumn rain in 2020 not falling until just about Thanksgiving. There was some encouraging follow-through in December, and some solid intermittent rain in January and February, but only a single 1-week period that brought any real volume. Just as it appeared we’d salvage an okay rain year after a solid March for rainfall, April arrived, with its reputation for “showers” making the absence of same all the more painful: we logged 0.2 inches of rain for the entire month! We saw no snow (once again…) but seasonably cold temperatures through the winter. Temperatures have gradually warmed, but not to the uncomfortable level yet; it’s actually remained relatively cool and outside work-friendly through now. Spring in the Sierra Foothills is spectacular once the hillsides green up. Already though, the brown-out has begun…

So what does all of this mean for the 2021 vintage? Not much, really. Another drought year, with the near-complete absence of rain in April, following on a cool winter, has meant a late-ish budburst (portending a late-ish harvest), grass between rows remarkably under control (the native grasses and planted red clover already focused on setting seed for next year), and the likely need to begin irrigating earlier than usual. The quality of the vintage will be set largely by what happens between now and September weather-wise.

Shaker Ridge has used the opportunities presented by COVID-19 interruptions to experiment with new things and position for the future. Always aware that our Primitivo had its feet in 2 completely different soil types that meet in a gentle swale area that tended to collect extra irrigation water (besides rain water in winter), we have permanently removed some vines from the swale area, reasoning that they won’t be optimal for other varietals, either. To the west of the swale, on well-draining schist soil, we cut down about 500 Primitivo vines last year and grafted them over to certain Portuguese varietals that have proven to do well on our site: Touriga Nacional and Tinta Amarela. The budwood came from our beloved Quinta block. In addition–with no great conviction about how they will do but wanting to find out–we grafted a few partial rows of Primitivo to Cabernet Sauvignon, to which rows we added via plantings a handful of Merlot and Petite Verdot vines for a mini-Bordeaux block on a scale suitable only for home winemakers. We expect our first Cabernet this season, but will only use it ourselves while we learn about the viticulture. These Bordeaux varietals were grafted/planted on the highest altitude portion of our vineyard to give them their best shot in our view. Then, just last week, we cut down additional Primitivo vines west of the swale and planted our first GSM block—Grenache, Syrah, and Mouvedre. Again, the scale will only be suitable for home winemakers, but presents an opportunity to experiment with these Rhone varietals that are well-recognized to do well in the El Dorado AVA. Finally, we cut down one short row of Primitivo on the south side of the Primitivo block and grafted some additional Souzao, a Portuguese varietal that provides dark color and decent acidity to Portuguese blends and for which our yield has been declining. This addition should increase our total Souzao yield by over 50%. This last operation has isolated a corner of short rows of our Primitivo which will be used this season for some focused experimentation on optimizing Primitivo viticultural practices.

All of the above has left us with a smaller but more homogeneous and still commercial scale block of now 19-year old Primitivo vines that are now completely on the reddish, rocky, clay loam soil that we think grows our best (and certainly lowest yielding) Primitivo. We are committed to growing the highest quality Primitivo that we can, benefiting from our accumulated experience and continuing to test new practices.

As of this date, we still have availability of each of our major varietals: Barbera, Primitivo, and Touriga, and even a sprinkling of some others, as we are selling our Quinta block varietals separately this year, giving opportunity to make some more obscure varietal wines like Tinta Cao and Tinta Amarela. We look forward to a great 2021 vintage and hope that the commercial wineries in our region enjoy a “relief rally” to celebrate what we hope will be a return to normalcy in the coming months.

The last few weeks have brought the inevitable and usually unavoidable high heat of late summer in the Foothills, with an absolutely brutal stretch of 105-110 F days a couple weeks ago that made the temperature readings in the 90s after they abated feel like cool fall weather. In fact, that wasn’t the beginning of fall, but just a reprieve before the next string of 100 F plus days forecast over Labor Day weekend and extending an unknown period into the future. Temperatures have moderated of late a few degrees compliments of a variable haze–not smoky-smelling, but hazy– from distant wild fires burning all over the state right now. Fortunately, there have been none nearby to date.

In the vineyard, the fact that we are actively managing only some of our vineyard blocks has allowed us to divert finite irrigation water to the actively managed blocks and get through this hot period so far. Our Primitivo and the first wave of our Barbera in particular will need to be nursed through this period until their harvest in about 10 days. We’ve reached full veraison in all of the grapes at this point, and our small planting of white muscat grapes is already harvested. Bird pressure has been modest this year; the roll out of nets is something our house cats look forward to every year, and their patrolling of the nets for song birds caught within results in a lot of feathers getting left at our doorstep, and happy cats. It also seems to temper birds’ interest in the grapes.

We have a little more time to prep before what is likely to be a rapid succession of harvests beginning with the Barbera and Primtivo, followed by our Quinta block, and finishing with our non-Quinta touriga, possibly all in September. We do have quantities of all but the Quinta still available for sale, and the wait to harvest will not be long now. Hopefully the grapes, and in particular the wines made from them, can be something positive we can look back on from 2020…

The growing season continues at Shaker Ridge as normal; the grapevines seem completely oblivious to the COVID-19 pandemic, as well they should be. We are now in the typical summer pattern of intense heat for a period of days or week, followed by a shorter period of relief, followed by a return to high heat. The vines tolerate the intense hot periods better than the farmers, who tend to seek shelter midday from the bright, cloudless sunshine typical of a Foothills summer. That said, the intensely hot periods have peaked in the high 90’s on several occasions but have really not breached the triple digits for more than a few hours at our site. We count that as a positive, and we’re already at that point in the season when anything short of 95 F for a mid-day high feels completely reasonable to us, low 90’s pleasant, and anything lower….downright cool. Such is the re-set of our internal thermostats at this time of year. We even had some June days with highs in the mid-70s…almost unheard of pleasant. We have not seen rain since mid-May, and don’t expect to see it until mid-September at earliest. All in all, if we can stay out of the triple digits (wishful thinking), this is shaping up to be a fantastic vintage, which would be nice counterpoint to the social-distanced and somewhat stressed world around us.

In the vineyard, bloom was on the late side and has come and gone. The fruit set appears solid–at least average for our main varietals–and the vines are healthy. We have been able to meet vines’ minimal irrigation needs given the moderate heat. Veraison started in our Tempranillo on or about July 14, a little bit on the late side but earlier than we would have expected from the late budburst. We immediately began netting our Quinta grapes, of which the the Tempranillo are a part, in hopes that we can get them completely buttoned up before the birds get a taste for it. They already have gotten a taste for cherries, blueberries, blackberries, plums, peaches…basically every fruit and berry we grow that ripens ahead of the grapes. Meanwhile, we’re on the lookout for star thistle–a miserable invastive weed–and pull it out manually wherever encountered to prevent its establishment. We’ll probably need one more preventative mildew spray to protect the grapes prior to full veraison.

Wine competitions were largely cancelled along with county fairs due to the novel coronavirus, but we’ve gotten some very positive anecdotal feedback on last year’s Quinta fruit and Barbera from clients. Our Quinta shares for this year are sold out, though there is still a possibility of securing o share via our waitlist. We still have plenty of our Barbera and–unusual for us at this point in the season–a little bit of Touriga available. This is because some of our commercial winery clients have been impacted more than us by COVID-19 given the closure for several months of tasting rooms at a prime time of the year, a closure which has been recently extended in some places outside of El Dorado and Amador Counties.

The “March Miracle” of generous rainfall continued briefly into April and then shutdown abruptly, giving way to sunny or partly sunny skies and slowly warming temperatures, culminating in some 80-degree plus days in late April. With a full soil profile of water, this was the signal that the grapes and annual grasses were waiting for, and the reluctantly green hillside gave way to verdant green, though inevitably to be baked to brown. We’ll enjoy the perfect spring weather and beautiful green in the meantime.

The vines didn’t come awake until mid-April, and though the different varietals pushed buds in their customary temporal order, it was a compressed period of about 2 weeks in which each of the varietals pushed. Fortunately, we were able to take advantage of the pause (finish?) of rain and start of budburst to finish grinding the winter prunings and get some weed sprays down before the grapes pushed. We have since already started shoot thinning in our earliest pushing varieties: tinta tao, muscat canelli, and tempranillo.

This past week was an historic one for our vineyard, as we cut down 500 of our 18-yo primitivo vines to graft over to additional touriga nacional, tinta amarela, and cabernet sauvignon. The section of the Primitivo vineyard chosen was one with a distinctly different soil than the balance, so we think this operation, while obviously providing some of the above varietals, will make for a more uniformly ripe Primitivo crop and benefit that varietal. The cab is a modest planting suitable only for home winemaker-type quantities and very much experimental. Though cab can readily grown well in most climates, it does not necessarily make the best wine in all climates, and the Sierra Foothills are not traditionally a strong area for this classic varietal. However, we had to take a shot, and we have chosen the highest point of our vineyard and a somewhat shaded area on well-drained soil, and we’ll see what’s possible with good care. When cabernet was grown more extensively in the area about 40 years ago, it was in an era that predated the widespread use of viticultural practices likely to give the best quality wines. Some excellent cabernet has been since made by certain growers in the Foothills, so we know that quality is achievable on the right site with the right care.

The tinta amarela planted would, for the first time, give us perhaps half-ton quantities that might be usable by a microwinery or home winemaker working on scale. It makes a lovely fruity dry wine or rose in addition to its traditional use in port-style blends. We have heretofore only had a modest planting as part of our Quinta block.

Shaker Ridge is pleased to offer again in 2020 our Quinta fruit as 250-lb shares. These allow buyers working on a home winemaker scale to obtain, with one stop, a complex blend of 5 different Portugese varietals suitable for a classic port-style wine or for a delicious, complex dry red. The grapes will be distributed on a single Saturday in the mid-September to mid-October time frame to be determined.