Happy Summer everyone! Summer on the farm is always busy, the tasting room is buzzing, live music in the vineyard, and of course caring for our crop throughout! August marks the beginning of harvest for most wineries in Indiana, so now is the time to finish emptying our storage tanks, cleaning barrels, prepping processing equipment and getting ready for the rush! Harvest time for wine grapes here in Indiana is late August through the middle of October. During these times we will be swimming in fruit as we process our bounties and turn it into wine. As you can imagine it can get quite hectic around here, but that’s part of the fun. A whole year of work comes to a dramatic conclusion!
To speak to our growing conditions this year, we are happy to report that things are much better than last year! Of course we all know that last year the late frost was a really hard hit on vineyards and orchards around Indiana. This year conditions have been more ideal, but not quite perfect. We have experienced large volumes of rainfall this season which is not ideal for wine grapes. While they do need rain to grow, famously grapes “don’t like wet feet,” or as my friend stated, “another great year to be a duck.” With lots of rain comes lots of disease and fungus pressure which is not good for any crop, thankfully we have kept up with our spray programs to mitigate widespread issue and as of writing this update, we are in good shape for a good crop this year. The rain is good for some things however, our new vineyard expansion is really loving all this rain. The young vines benefit from good consistent watering, which mother nature has taken care of for us.
To speak to what is happening in the tasting room, we are slowly bringing all of our normal services back online in a post COVID environment. We have continued offering wine flights for the time period as we have found that they are much more manageable for the staff during business hours. We are also seeing an increase in traffic over this entire season, that coupled with a large increase in food sales has us working on balancing services to ensure everyone has a great experience when they come to visit. We are working behind the scenes on bringing more small events back and our lovely wine club members will be the first ones to hear about these events when we are ready to announce them! Speaking of announcing events, our annual Harvest Moon Festival is back this year and we are looking forward to seeing all of your wonderful faces there on October 2nd!
Cheers! The Leaderbrand Family