September 19, 2018 |
Newsletters |
Raffaldini Vineyards
Hurricane Florence, Festa Italiana, and Harvest Update
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Hi All,
Jay Raffaldini here.
With so much happening this past week, I wanted to take the time to provide you all with an update. Hurricane Florence could not have come at a more challenging time given its remnants hit the weekend of our annual Raffaldini Festa Italiana. We have held this event for 12 years always on the third Saturday of September. The event has become so popular we routinely have 1500 to 2000 people attending with folks driving in from multiple states to join in the celebration. Hence, we made the decision to move Festa to Saturday, October 20th after significant discussion. Even if the storm had detoured around us, I found it very hard to have a joyous festival when many of our fellow North Carolinians were risking life and property. Our thoughts and prayers go to everyone impacted by this storm. I hope you are all able to attend this signature Raffaldini event in October and apologies for any inconveniences it has placed upon anyone.
On a much less important note, as most of you know we hang our grapes as long as possible to get the deepest and most fruitful extraction to create the "big" house style of our wines. Given the cooler and wetter than normal July we had, the grapes were behind schedule, so we were faced with the decision to either bring in less than perfectly-developed, ripe grapes and make a leaner style of wine or let the grapes hang through the storm, take the losses and see what happens. My career on Wall Street has taught me one thing and that is the only bad risk is the one you don't take. So, with that mantra we decided to let 42 tons of Montepulciano, Sagrantino and Petit Verdot hang. We took some losses but survived and we are letting the fruit hang as long as we can. If we can get another week of sunny and dry weather, we will have "weathered the storm" so to speak. Just another reminder that no matter how much we believe otherwise, we are all passengers on life's journey.
