11/09/2026
There are only a few hours left until harvest, and we would like to give you an update and a realistic picture of the season
2026 has been a hard year to read.
Five heat waves.
June ended with 57% less rain than normal and average temperatures 3.3°C above the reference period, with daytime highs more than 4°C above.
July was the third hottest since records began in 1961.
On 28 August we passed every temperature ever recorded here for that date.
Across our valley there were 32 days above 35°C, the highest number in the whole series, and 47 tropical nights.
The even stranger part is that the summer rainfall total came out close to normal. The water arrived in a handful of violent storms, 30 millimetres in an hour, most of it running off the surface instead of soaking in. A vineyard cannot drink that way. Our vines are not irrigated, so they lived the whole season on what the soil could hold from one storm to the next.
We conducted visual and chemical-physical analyses of the grapes both in early July and mid August, and overall, the clusters looked good. However, the vines were beginning to show the first signs of water stress.
On 1 September, before the rain that fell that afternoon, we went through the vineyard and brought back thirteen bunches to visually analyze them
Some bunches are still perfect: full, even, nothing to report.
Others show sunburn on the shoulders that faced the afternoon sun, berries that dried on the vine, and in a few cases an entire section of the bunch that shut down because the piece of rachis feeding it, the woody skeleton that carries sugar to the berries, stopped working.
This is literally the first time in our experience that we’ve seen a grapes bunches with one part that’s literally cooked, charred, and another part that’s almost green.
Most balsamic on the market never meets “their own” vineyard.
Using cooked must straight from the grape is a completely different game than compared to cooking must that has first been concentrated.
The range of what a season can do has widened, and the experience handed down to us is a less reliable guide than it used to be.
Only time will tell us how we interpreted each season.
