Any assessment of the winegrape harvest now under way in Santa Barbara and San Luis Obispo counties depends on which varietal and which area you’re talking about.

In some cases, it may depend on which part of the same vineyard you’re referring to, as the Central Coast seems to have experienced a form of ultra-microclimatization this year.

“It’s a bipolar vintage,” said Lino Bozzano, vineyard manager at Laetitia Winery and Vineyards just south of Arroyo Grande.

Louis Lucas at Lucas & Lewellyn Vineyards in Solvang had a similar opinion: “If anything, you’d have to term this year ‘different.’”

In some cases, the production volume is down; in other cases, it’s running about normal or at least more than vineyard managers anticipated because of a frost in April that slowed development and a hot spell around the time the vines flowered.

“I’ve heard a lot of people are up to 40 percent short of their crop estimations,” said Curt Schalchlin, who was in the process of making his Sans Liege Rhone varietals Friday at Central Coast Wine Services in Santa Maria. “But we’re meeting all our contracts, which is great.

“It probably has a lot to do with the early (spring) frost — the plants kind of had to regroup,” added Schalchlin, who gets most of his grapes from Westside Paso Robles and Santa Barbara County.

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But Jim Stollberg at Riverbench Vineyard & Winery east of Santa Maria said production is better than expected for the pinot noir and chardonnay varietals grown there.

“Overall, it’s better than we estimated,” Stollberg said. “It will still be on the lighter side. ... We’re getting about 2Ý tons per acre, which is really close to our normal average. We had estimated it would be closer to 2 tons.”

Some growers are more than 50 percent into the harvest for some varietals; others say they haven’t even started picking.

At Talley Vineyards & Winery east of Arroyo Grande, vineyard manager Kevin Wilkinson said about 60 percent of the pinot noir has been harvested, but the chardonnay harvest has barely started.

A temperature roller coaster, with a hot spell in August followed by cool weather in September, has put the Talley harvest on a similar track.

“Some of the blocks on higher profiles got a lot of heat and they came on strong,” Wilkinson said, noting hot-spell temperatures got has high as 116 in some parts of the vineyard. “But we had a little cool spell that stopped all sugar accumulation. Now we’re just waiting for things to get ripe.”

Down in Lompoc, Norm Huber at Huber Vineyards said it will be at least a couple of weeks before he begins harvesting his pinot noir, chardonnay and Dornfelder in the Santa Rita Hills.

“It’s still slow,” he said. “We haven’t even taken samples in a couple of weeks. ... The yield is very low because of the frost this year. It’s not going to be a good year for us.”

But generally, vintners are happy with the quality of the grapes that are coming off the vines.

“The crop is off 30 to 40 percent, but some of the varieties are quite good,” Lucas said of the Lucas & Lewellyn harvest, noting the Malbec and cabernet franc “are almost perfect crops.”

“We’ll be picking quite a bit of chardonnay this coming week,” he said Friday. “It’s testing quite good. What I’ve seen of the grapes at the winery — especially the pinot noir — I’m very pleased.”

Bozzano said Laetitia is seeing an unusual feature in its grapes this year.

“One thing that’s unique to this vintage is there are very few seeds in the berries, which will give the wine a very nice quality,” he said, although he couldn’t say why the grapes are almost seedless.

“Who knows?” he said. “It could be related to something happening during the (fruit) set. It’s so hard to know what causes these things.”

James Ontiveros, who grows pinot noir in the Santa Maria Valley for his Native9 wines, said the quality of the grapes is “excellent.”

“Santa Maria is right on where we want to be,” Ontiveros said, noting that, so far, “the weather is cooperating” with a marine layer in the mornings and temperatures in the low 70s in the afternoons.

“It’s really ideal because you can see the ripeness of the fruit happening slowly,” he explained. “What always scares us is a heat wave, especially when the grapes are so close to ripeness. It will push them beyond where we want to be ... What we don’t want to see right now is rain or a really hot spell.”

September 21, 2008