The Soundtrack of Harvest in the Dundee Hills
Jay Boberg spends, by his definition, an extraordinary amount of time getting his harvest playlist ready. In fact, he’s in the middle of harvest, and it’s still not finished. But it’s playing in the background, and the vibes are high as the sorting line shakes Pinot Noir clusters through several sets of hands pulling out any fruit that isn’t perfect, down to a destemmer, and into fermentation tanks where the melody of grapes transforming to wine will take hold.
Before he was running harvest at Nicolas-Jay, which he co-owns with his dear friend and Burgundian winemaker, Jean-Nicolas Méo, Jay co-founded the Indie record label IRS. Records, and later served as president of Universal/MCA Music Publishing and MCA Records. “There are certain wines, like certain albums,” he says, “that move you and stay with you forever.”
But today, he’s on the sorting line, cracking jokes with the harvest crew. He says the harvest has been excellent and the vintage is shaping up to be “very, very good at a minimum, and quite possibly excellent.”
A solid rain and a window of cooler temperatures at the beginning of September postponed what had looked like an early harvest season in Oregon as the vines soaked up that rainfall and the sugar percentages dropped. But the rain also gave the vines the burst of energy they needed to finish ripening the clusters. And now it’s all hands on deck for the next two weeks.
Harvest days are not for the faint of heart. For Jay and the Nicolas-Jay team, the days begin early and stretch well into the evening. “This sort of 10- or 12-day period looks like this: try to get to bed before 10 pm, get up at 5 am and out the door, get to the vineyard and pick for as little as two and as many as seven hours. Then we head out, stop for lunch, and get back to the winery to start sorting. That could take a couple hours, or we could still be here at 8 pm tonight.”
Jay describes harvest as physically demanding, but incredibly rewarding. “We’re creating something,” he says. “We’ll never take a shortcut, because the precision that we bring to our winemaking is what defines our success.”
For visitors, harvest is one of the most interesting times of year to experience the Dundee Hills, when the people behind the wines are often right there in the middle of it all. “The Dundee Hills AVA is gorgeous, and these wineries are really focused on quality. When folks visit during harvest, they have the chance to meet the people actually making the wine. So many of these wineries are small, family-run organizations, and they get to see it in action during a harvest visit.”
And for the curious, here’s Jay’s harvest playlist, Summer Breeze. He recommends it with a Dundee Hills Pinot Noir.
