08/28/06 Here comes the wine

Here comes the wine. I'm Greg Martin with today's Fruit Grower Report. It's wine grape time. Growers are just getting underway with this years harvest and it looks like another great year. Paul Champoux is the chairman of the Washington Association of Wine Grape Growers. CHAMPOUX: Actually looks like a real good year. I'm pretty pumped up about it. The quality looks exceptional again. With the weather that Washington has it just keeps pumping out those high quality years, vintage years. Champoux has discovered why the area is producing such good grapes. CHAMPOUX: One of the key things you know is the sunlight we have here. We get a couple or a long day of sunshine. We get a couple more hours a day that California does just because of our latitude. And then the cool nights is another thing that produces quality. As the nights cool off the grapes don't use up their acid so we have a better balanced grapes go into make the wine, balance is much better because of the balance of sugar, acid and PH. Those three things there are the key for quality. The harvest is just getting underway. CHAMPOUX: The has been a little bit of early varieties of sauvignon blanc and usually the earliest one is Red Mountain sauvignon blanc and I know there's some others. Tomorrow Paul Champoux talks about the expected tonnage of this year's crop. That's today's Fruit Grower Report. I'm Greg Martin on the Northwest Ag Information Network.