This Week

The Answer Out Back

Where the harvest story lives in November, and how it reaches the people pouring the wine

This issue is about what happens when a guest asks how harvest went. The host has spent the fall pouring, so the answer usually comes out as a weather report, while the people who could tell the real story are out back cleaning bins. The story is a quiet weekday on the east side of Seneca Lake. A short piece that runs only in this email follows a restaurant server who did have the answer, because the winemaker ate family meal with the staff that afternoon. Insights covers a twenty-minute handoff from the cellar to the counter before the holidays, and the rest of the issue looks at how the 2026 harvest came in, from Santa Barbara County and British Columbia to France and Spain.

Stories  ·  Tasting Room

How Was Harvest?

A guest on Seneca Lake asks the question every tasting room hears in November, and the real answer is forty yards away on the crush pad

It was a Tuesday afternoon in early November, one of those weekdays on the east side of Seneca Lake when there are four cars in the parking lot and two of them belong to the staff. The tasting room was in an old barn with a long window behind the counter, and through it I could see the lake gone gray for the season and, closer in, the crush pad, where a young man in rubber boots was hosing the last of the Riesling out of a picking bin, his breath showing in the cold, and stacking the bin on top of the others.

A retired couple from Toronto had come in a few minutes after me. They had driven down for a long weekend that turned into a long week, they said, because a friend told them the dry Riesling here was worth the trip. When the host poured it, the husband swirled it, tasted it, and asked the question every guest asks this time of year, which is how harvest went.

Only in the Newsletter  ·  Restaurant

Family Meal

A server in a wine town restaurant, a table of four, and a story she heard at four o’clock that afternoon

The restaurant sat on a side street a block off the plaza, the kind of place in a small wine town where half the list comes from wineries within ten miles and the other half comes from people the owner met on trips. I was there on a Thursday in early November with three friends, at the table by the window where the cold came off the glass. Our server was a woman in her late twenties with her hair pulled back and a pen behind her ear, and when one of my friends asked about a Syrah from a producer none of us knew, she set down the water pitcher and stayed.

She said the winemaker had come in that afternoon for family meal, which at that restaurant is pasta and whatever the kitchen has too much of, eaten standing up around the pass at four o’clock before service. He brings a bottle most weeks once harvest is over, and the staff taste it with him. This time he told them the Syrah block had been picked at night, by headlamp, because the forecast called for a heat spike that would have pushed the sugars past where he wanted them, and that the crew finished around three in the morning and ate breakfast burritos off the tailgate of his truck.

She told it in about a minute, in her own words, and stopped once to fix a detail she had wrong, because the pick had been in late August and not September. Then she said the wine reminded her of a dirt road after rain, and that she liked it with the duck. We ordered the bottle, and on the way out one of my friends asked her to write the winery’s name on the back of the check so he could look for it at home.

I asked her how often the winemakers come in for family meal. Two or three a month in the winter, she said, and hardly ever in the summer when everyone is too busy. The owner started it a few years ago because the servers kept getting questions about the list that nobody on the floor could answer, and the whole thing costs him a few pounds of pasta and whatever the winemaker opens. She said the servers argue over who gets to sell that week’s wine.

It had started to rain a little when we left. The busser was stacking chairs on the tables in the back room, and through the kitchen door I could see one of the cooks wiping down the pass where the winemaker had stood that afternoon with his bottle.

The restaurant and the people in it are drawn from places and conversations from this fall, with some details combined and changed.

Insights  ·  How-To

The Post-Harvest Debrief

Twenty minutes between the cellar and the counter before the holiday traffic arrives

The new Insights post makes the case for one short meeting before the holidays. The winemaker or a cellar hand sits down with the tasting room hosts and gives each of them one true story from this vintage, such as the block that came in early, the night pick before the rain, or the press that jammed at two in the morning. Each host leaves with something real to say when a guest asks how harvest went. The same idea works in a restaurant, where the kitchen tells the servers what changed on the menu and why.

Classes  ·  Front Line Mondays

The Guest in Front of You

A live online staff class for anyone in a guest-facing hospitality role

Front Line Mondays is a series of 90-minute online classes for the people who meet the guest first: tasting room hosts, servers, bartenders, and front desk staff. The first class covers how to read a guest in the first minute after they walk in, and how to tell the story of the place in the host’s own words so it doesn’t sound memorized. It is a working class with practice in small breakout groups, and nobody needs to prepare anything. Each class stands on its own, so an owner or manager can send one person or the whole team.

Around the World

An Early, Short Year

Spain and France close out the 2026 harvest, and Spain’s wine trade looks to its restaurants and bars

Spain is finishing the earliest harvest on record, with heat pushing picking forward about two weeks in many growing areas and the crop estimated at around 34 million hectoliters. The cellars were full before it came in. Stocks of wine and must stood at 40.1 million hectoliters at the end of August, up 21.9 percent on a year earlier, according to the Spanish Wine Interprofessional Organization, while the wine Spaniards drink at home keeps slipping. France is in a similar spot, with the agriculture ministry’s October estimate at about 34.9 million hectoliters, 14 percent below its five-year average.

Last week the Spanish Wine Federation met in Jerez de la Frontera to take stock of the harvest and the year ahead. Alongside prices and sales, the committees spent time on how to get more wine onto tables in restaurants and bars and make it seem worth ordering there. It is the question this week’s story asks of a tasting room host, raised by a whole country’s wine trade about its servers and bartenders.

The Numbers

48%

Drop in Champagne’s 2026 harvest compared with 2025, according to Agreste, the French agriculture ministry’s statistics office. Picking started in mid-August, and the ministry reported the lightest bunch weights in twenty years.

0.4%

Growth in international tourist arrivals worldwide in the first half of 2026, according to UN Tourism’s September World Tourism Barometer. The agency cut its full-year forecast to 1 to 2 percent, down from the 3 to 4 percent it projected in January.

About half

Share of California’s wine grape crop that entered the 2026 harvest without a buyer contract, Allied Grape Growers president Jeff Bitter told the Associated Press. In a typical year, 70 to 80 percent is contracted before picking starts.

Worth Reading

Despite Warm, Dry Seasons, 2026 Grape Yields Below Average

Noozhawk, October 31

Laurie Jervis talks with three Santa Barbara County winemakers about a harvest that started absurdly early. Sea Smoke picked Pinot Noir for its sparkling wine on June 30, nearly three weeks ahead of its previous record, and Tomi Cellars in Buellton brought in 80 percent of its fruit in two weeks. Ken Brown marked his fiftieth vintage with a party in August. Every one of those details is something a host could hand a guest across the counter.

BC Wine Harvest 2026: Promising Fruit, Wildfire Losses and a Complicated Vintage

BC Wine Trends, October 31

Thirteen British Columbia wineries report on a year that started early and looked promising until wildfire smoke reached parts of the Okanagan. Some producers assessed their fruit lot by lot and changed how they made the wine, and a few gave up entire estate crops. It is a useful read for any tasting room that has to explain a hard vintage honestly without scaring off the guest.

The Hospitality Industry Responds to the Government’s 2026 Budget

Restaurant Online, October 29

Last week’s issue noted the UK Budget was due the morning it went out. The trade’s verdict is in, and it isn’t good. Restaurant and pub operators say the business rates relief for smaller venues does little against rising wage bills and alcohol duty, and calls for lower VAT and relief on employer National Insurance went unanswered. Tighter budgets usually land first on staffing, which makes the people still on the floor matter more.

Meet the Winemakers  ·  For the Host

Greg La Follette, Marchelle Wines

Asked what a newcomer to wine already knows that a winemaker can build on, Greg La Follette said to put a punch-down stick in their hand. Plunging one fermenter and then the next, a guest smells the wine at different stages and sees what is happening in the cellar, which no tasting sheet can show them. La Follette recorded his interview just after harvest at Marchelle Wines in Sebastopol, where he still plays the bagpipes for the first grapes of the year and the last press load.

Meet the Winemakers is an oral history series with winemakers around the world. Winemakers who want to take part can book an hour.