Harvest 2026: A Worthy Gamble

With the last of the grapes coming off the vines just yesterday, Harvest 2026 is officially in the books, but Vintage 2026 is just beginning. The fruit is picked and now we move into the cellar to care for it: pressing and pumping, tasting and planning, punching down and racking, and cleaning – mostly cleaning. So how was harvest ‘26? It was a gamble, but we think it’s paid off…

This harvest was tricky. It was a relatively cloudy and cool ripening season, and while it thankfully stayed quite dry, we didn’t have many of those hot and sunny fall days to push the fruit over the finish line. So we had to be patient. We had to give the vines time to care for their fruit. We carefully made picking plans, and then, when the forecast changed slightly, we carefully made new picking plans. We did that a lot.

We had to be defiant. Most of the growing season, we’re at Mother Nature’s mercy, responding frantically to her whims. Come harvest time we get gutsy, standing our ground, betting on our vines and their ability to handle whatever she throws at them, risking our fruit through rain or cold for the hope of just one more good day of ripening on the other side.

Contending with imperfect weather is one of the exciting challenges of making wine in a climate like ours. At this point in the season, we think often of a little piece of wisdom we learned from our favorite winemaker while working in New Zealand: “If you pick before a rain when the fruit isn’t ripe, you’re guaranteed to make a mediocre wine. But if you hang it, there’s still a possibility of making something great.” This year, more than any other since we’ve been at Lincoln Peak, we put this philosophy to the test.

So, in search of extra ripening days and with a healthy dose of courage, we decided to hang about 50% of the vineyard into the second week of October when most everyone else in the state had finished picking. The risk, we believe, has paid off. This year’s fruit is intensely flavorful, complex, vivid, and full of energy.

We chose what to pick and what to let hang on a vine-by-vine basis, doing multiple passes through each vineyard block at specific times. It’s labor intensive and time consuming, but carefully evaluating the condition of each vine is truly the greatest tool a winegrower has for ensuring ripeness. This multi-pass strategy is something often seen in cooler wine-growing areas known for white wine, like Austria and Germany, and we already have really high hopes for the 2026 wines.

Now comes the fun part: making the wine! You’ll find us in the cellar keeping track of more than 30 different fermentations, each one unique and demanding. Fermentation is dynamic, so we taste the rapidly changing wines every day, watching carefully to see how flavors evolve, discussing maceration and temperature, and making sure nothing goes wrong. There is no formula or standard recipe. Rather than make a wine that tastes identical year after year, our focus is on finding the best expression of each individual vintage. That is, to us, the beauty of wine driven by its terroir.

Stay tuned for more from us as the 2026 wines settle in for the winter. In the meantime, read on for a bunch of exciting events to come, and we hope to see you in the tasting room soon!  

Harvest is Over

More than three weeks ago, with frozen fingers and the first frost crunching underfoot, we picked the last rows of Frontenac Noir, the last clusters of the 2025 harvest. That fruit is now wine, and this week, we rack the Frontenac Noir to barrel, tucking it in for its long, quiet rest. The madness of harvest continues long after we finish picking, but now that the most time-sensitive tasks in the winery are just about complete, we can finally say HARVEST IS OVER! Celebration requires too much energy, so for now we rest and reflect.

The 2025 growing season was an eventful one. Without the grace we gave ourselves in our first year of farming this vineyard, and with all that we had learned and wanted to do differently, the stakes felt high. A cool, misty spring with two frost scares and lots of disease pressure dampened our spirits right out of the gate. Eventually the clouds cleared, the sun shone, and the vines grew quickly, our confidence growing with them. An intense heatwave in July brought swarms of unwelcome Japanese beetles that turned leaves to lace. We tried to tell ourselves that they were helping to thin the canopy and expose the fruit but we weren’t convinced. Thankfully, the heat soon broke and the beetles disappeared as quickly as they arrived, sparing the vines from any lasting damage.

The next couple months were the real story of the 2025 vintage. At the beginning of August, just as the clusters began to ripen, a dry pattern settled in with abundant sun, warm days, and cool nights that made us feel like we were back in California. The ensuing drought was devastating for most farmers in Vermont, but this is the weather that every winemaker dreams of in the run up to harvest, keeping berries small, concentrating flavors, and staving off rot and mildew. Without rain storms to force our hand, we were able to pick exactly when we wanted, an unthinkable luxury that made harvest feel almost leisurely.

The dry weather led to lower yields in the vineyard but exceptional quality in the winery, characterized by big, structured wines that will outlive us. We harvested a total of 13.7 tons of fruit this year, including 7.8 tons picked in a massive 5-day push just before a big rain and the first frost. That's the kind of picking timing that produces great wines and is only possible because of our community of volunteers and their dedication to harvest. We simply can’t thank them enough.

The end of the season brings relief, satisfaction, and joy, as well as a strange sense of mourning as the vineyard goes dormant. These plants that you’ve marveled at and worked with all year, inspired by their ambition, feeding off their energy, so suddenly lose their leaves and become skeletons. But the wines, those eternal legacies of the growing season, are there to comfort us throughout the winter until the vines greet us again in the spring. And then we get to do it all again.

Update from the Winery

Kevin and Rosie working on 2024 Limestone blends.
Taste. Discuss. Conceptualize. Blend. Taste. Discuss. Repeat.

Tis the season for blending

The darkest months of the year tend to be the slowest in the winery. It’s a rewarding and restful time for a winemaker; a time for reflection, planning, and lots of tasting.

As the yeast convert the last bits of sugar to alcohol, the ephemeral aromas of fermentation dissipate and the wines begin to clarify and take shape. This is when the nuances of the growing season and our practices in the vineyard and winery begin to reveal themselves.

The wines are still very young, especially the reds, but we can see more clearly than ever where they’ll go. Time alone will do most of the work, but there are a few techniques we can utilize in the cellar to pull the wines in one direction or another. These include careful oxygen exposure (or lack thereof), timely rackings, and bâttonage.

Most important, though, may be blending. The majority of wines that end up in our glass are a blend of different base wines from the cellar, carefully combined to build complexity, balance, and beauty. This, we think, is the most artistic aspect of winemaking.

Blending season kicks off with an early look at the new vintage of Limestone because the 2023 is almost sold out! We’re putting together bench blends with different proportions of Louise Swenson, Prairie Star, and two expressions of La Crescent. Teasing out flavors, popping aromatics, and building textures. It’s pretty fun. Grab some bottles of 2023 Limestone before they’re gone!