The Wine Knows

The Washington Association of Wine Grape Growers is reporting that the final estimated number for the 2007 harvest is 127,150 tons of wine grapes. This is a record, surpassing last year's harvest of 120,000 tons (which surpassed 2005's record number of 116,760 tons).

As you may recall, the crop estimate in mid-August was 131,000 tons. Since the pre-harvest numbers can't take into account all fruit that might be dropped in mid-veraison or grapes left in the vineyard because they aren't purchased, they usually are a bit high, so this estimate was darned close.

To give you an idea of what this means to the country's No. 2 wine-producing state, a ton of grapes makes approximately 66.5 cases of wine. Thus, this increase in tonnage comes out to nearly 475,000 additional cases of wine. In addition to increases at the larger wineries (Columbia Crest, Ste. Michelle, Hogue), dozens of new wineries launched with this fall's crush. If, in fact, there were actually 500 wineries in Washington (there aren't), each would need to increase production by fewer than 1,000 cases to take on this additional tonnage. We know Columbia Crest is likely increasing by at least 100,000 cases alone, and we can bet Ste. Michelle is not decreasing its Riesling production. Pacific Rim Winery is making 130,000 cases (a bit of which came from Oregon and 15% of which came from Germany), up from 75,000 cases from the 2006 harvest.

To put this further into perspective, the country's No. 1 wine producer, California, crushed more than 3 million tons of grapes this fall.

We will get a clearer picture of the 2007 harvest in late January when the U.S. Department of Agriculture releases its report.