Harvest 2026 Recap
With our final press-outs taking place tomorrow, it's a nice time to reflect on the 2026 harvest season. Farming doesn't hand you the same season twice. Some years the fruit comes in fast and full. This year, it asked more of us, block by block, and our team met it with the same care and unique attention, especially when looking at smaller than expected yields.
From July 7 through September 11, our team processed 180 tons of fruit across 94 separate intakes, bringing in 38 different grape varieties destined for everything from traditional method sparkling and force carbonated sparkling to still wines, appassimento method wines, and fortified wines. Fruit came in from a wide geographic spread this year: Texas Hill Country, Texas High Plains, and Texas Davis Mountains AVAs, along with two proposed AVAs, Hickory Sands District and Dell Valley.
Among various experiments conducted this season, initial trials using Texas White Oak in red wine fermentations resulted in better color, so Texas White Oak was used in the majority of the red wine fermentations over the course of the season.
That range says a lot about what this team is capable of juggling in a single season. But the number that matters most isn't the tonnage, it's the 94 intakes. Relative to the tons we brought in, that's a smaller average lot size than we've seen in any recent harvest, and it wasn't by design. Weather conditions this year were unforgiving in places, and yields came in lower than expected across several vineyards. Our own Bending Branch Estate Vineyard saw no yield at all this season because of frost conditions in the spring.
The order that the fruit arrived was also a bit different from recent years. For the first time in recent memory, the season closed with Texas Hill Country fruit rather than Texas High Plains. In 2023, 2024, and 2025, High Plains fruit consistently came in last and stretched harvest into October. This year, the last intake landed on September 11, nearly five weeks earlier than a typical High Plains closing season, even though harvest opened on July 7, within the same two week window we've seen kick things off every year since 2023. Interestingly, two of the last three lots that came in were for rosé production.
Our production team treated every one of those 94 intakes with great care and attention to detail. Kudos to the entire harvest team for their quality care of fruit that has been carefully managed throughout the growing season.
While the yields were lower, the fruit quality was very high. We're genuinely excited about this vintage and how these wines are developing. A season like this one has a way of producing something special. We look forward to sharing these wines in the glass.