What's New at Larch Hills Winery
It has been a cool start to our Spring season here at the winery. In April we continued to move through our vineyard and prune our vines back. This year we are faced with the challenging reality that here, like much of the Okanagan Valley to the South, we are seeing potentially devastating damage from the cold weather we experienced late last year and throughout the winter. The beautiful weather that extended our growing season last fall and allowed us to ripen our grapes after a sluggish, cool start to the growing season gave way and we moved into winter almost overnight. The late harvest combined with the early onset of winter conditions did not give the vines much time to move into dormancy which will also have lowered the cold hardiness of the buds across the board. We have taken a conservative approach to pruning this year leaving lots of extra buds/canes. I’m expecting a lower crop yield this year than usual, but that usually means we can expect more concentrated and expressive wines next year. Crossing our fingers and hoping for the best!
On the winemaking side of things, we have released our 2022 vintages of our
Ortega,
Siegerrebe,
Pinot Gris,
Malbec and
Tamarack Rose. 2022 was a great year for winemaking. Crop yields were good to above average for most varietals and the nice weather late in the fall delivered ripe concentrated fruit. I’m very excited about our Ortega and Siegerrebe this year, they are the most aromatic and expressive wines we’ve seen in the past five vintages, and both greatly benefitted from a normal growing season last year.
Next month we will be releasing our 2022
Semillon, first vintage of Petit Verdot, and finally have our
Sparkling Rose back in stock! Wine club members will receive an email granting early access to the release of the Petit Verdot and Sparkling Rose. The Petit Verdot will be sold exclusively at the winery.
I’m looking forward to writing more of these monthly email updates which I plan on including what we have going on in the vineyard and as well as different aspects of winemaking.
