Here Come the Grapes

I told you earlier this week that the 2015 wine grape harvest was getting underway and Vicky Scharlau, executive director of the Washington Association of Wine Grape Growers says this has been a surprising crop.

SCHARLAU: In early November we saw temperatures that dropped down into the teens. In some areas we actually got down into the single digits but that didn't really seem to impact the crop but we did have some damage on younger plantings. Now since then we have continued to have a really warm summer. The AgWeatherNet in Benton City indicated that there were 14 straight days of more than 100 degrees so this of course pushed lots of crops in Washington State ahead and included in that were wine grapes.

This will translate into a record harvest as far as how early it's being harvested but not necessarily in terms of volume.

SCHARLAU: The industry gets together and the wine grape growers have a crop estimating group that talks about the numbers in terms of a management tool that's used going into harvest. At this point we're looking at somewhere between where we were last year with our crop estimate which was 233-thousand tons and Crush Ag Stats has the number coming in at about 227-thousand tons so so we'll probably this year in terms of our estimate at this point looking at about 231-thousand tons.

She says though that winemakers are very optimistic about this years quality which even though there are fewer grapes, the wine may once again be considered a vintage of the century.

That's today's Fruit Grower Report. I'm Greg Martin on the Ag Information Network of the West.