Color is beginning to change in all blocks, timing is similar to 2008 and 2010.
There is very little fruit to drop this year - no 3rd clusters, very few laggard wings, and no "extra" crop to thin. For our own winery, we probably won't drop anything, one of our larger customers has requested that we drop all of the wings (we'll do more work looking for the wings than actually dropping any). What's out there looks to be maturing at the same time. It will be interesting, given the length and uneveness of the bloom period, to see what effect this has on veraison. If veraison proceeds normally, I'm expecting harvest to occur around the 2nd week of October.
