Harvest at Larkhaven isn’t one day, it’s several weeks of small decisions, block by block. Cabernet doesn’t ripen evenly across forty-two acres of hillside — a block facing south catches more direct sun and comes in first, while a shaded, fog-cooled block a few hundred yards away might hang another ten days. Picking too early across the board flattens all of that into one uniform (and uniformly less interesting) wine.
Tasting the block, not the calendar
The decision to pick a given block isn’t made from a spreadsheet of sugar readings alone, though those numbers matter. It comes down to actually walking the rows, tasting berries off the vine, and checking whether the seeds have gone from green and bitter to brown and nutty — that’s a better tell for tannin ripeness than sugar content ever is on its own. A block can hit the “right” Brix reading and still taste unfinished if the seeds haven’t caught up.
Hand-picked, on purpose
Every cluster at Larkhaven comes off the vine by hand, into small picking bins rather than a truck bed, specifically so nothing gets crushed and starts oxidizing before it reaches the sorting table. It’s slower than a mechanical harvester, and on a hillside this steep a machine wouldn’t be practical anyway — but the real reason is that hand-picking lets a crew leave underripe or damaged clusters on the vine instead of dragging them along with everything else.
What the crew is actually watching for
Beyond ripeness, the picking crew is watching the weather as closely as the fruit. A hillside vineyard like this one can lose a week’s worth of careful waiting to a single rain event that swells the berries and dilutes everything that was concentrating all summer. Some years that means picking a block a few days earlier than ideal rather than gambling on a forecast — a smaller, more certain harvest beats a bigger, waterlogged one.
The wines from any given harvest won’t be in bottle — let alone in the tasting room — for a while yet. In the meantime, the current releases already reflect a few of these same hillside blocks from an earlier vintage; see what’s pouring now.