2016 was a year of very wet fog in the springtime for an extended period of time which caused the vines to lose many of their flowers. In the wine industry, we call this ‘shatter.’ Shatter gets its name because the cluster looks like shattered glass with many of the berries missing from the cluster. Most of the time when we deal with crops that have been ‘damaged’ by the weather, we expect the quality to be less than ideal. But this year, somehow the quality was exceptional. The pick was roughly 3 weeks earlier than a typical year, as we expected. Aside from the challenges listed, we did have a pretty good time making wine.