Beyond the Bottle, Culinary & Wine
Fall at the Winery: What Really Happens After Harvest Begins
At LaBelle Winery, fall means one vintage is finishing while the next begins. This is the story of what happens after the grapes are in: the pressing, the fermenting, and the long, quiet work of aging that turns each harvest into a finished wine.
Grape Picking Day Is a Celebration, Not Just a Harvest:
There’s a morning every fall that I look forward to all year, before a single grape comes off the vine.
Our Vineyard Club members show up for it: a community of wine lovers, LaBelle supporters, and nature enthusiasts who come back year after year just to be part of it. Somewhere between 75 and 100 of them, alongside our own team, working the vineyard together until our Amherst harvest, about 8 tons, is in. It’s become the true kickoff to our season, and it’s my favorite day of the year to be a winemaker.
Before the first grape is cut, I take a moment with everyone gathered, for a blessing I say every Harvest Morning. I recognize every winery across the country doing this same work at the same time: the same early mornings, the same long days ahead of them. It’s become something close to sacred to me. Before anything else happens, we’re grateful.
Why Our Fruit Comes From More Than One Place:
The vineyards on our Amherst property, named Pedroso and Arboleda, are planted with cold-hardy varietals bred to handle a New Hampshire winter: Seyval Blanc, Petite Ami, and Cayuga for our whites, Noiret, Chancellor, and Petite Pearl for our reds.
These are varietals developed specifically to survive temperatures that would kill a classic vinifera vine, so they thrive here rather than merely surviving here. Out in the vineyard in the days leading up to picking, we’re watching Brix, the measure of sugar in the grape, on the vine itself. It’s what tells us the moment has actually arrived. At our Derry location vineyard, the vines are still young, and we’re looking ahead to our first Derry harvest in 2027.
But New Hampshire’s growing season is simply too short to properly ripen grapes like Cabernet Sauvignon or Merlot. So for the wines that call for that kind of fruit, we go to the regions built for it. From Washington State, we bring in Chardonnay and Muscat for our whites, and Cabernet Sauvignon, Cabernet Franc, Merlot, Malbec, Syrah, and Grenache for our reds. From New York, we bring in Riesling, Seyval, Noiret, and Foch, along with pear, apple, blueberry, and cranberry for a handful of fruit wines that round out our list. That lineup isn’t fixed. Every year, we decide what we want to produce, and that decision drives which varieties we bring in from Washington and New York next.
We start with the wine we want to make, then find the place that can grow that fruit the way it deserves to be grown.
Not Every Truck Arrives the Same Way:
Here’s something most people never think to ask: our fruit doesn’t all arrive in the same form.
Our Washington reds come to us as whole clusters, the same way our own Amherst fruit does, which means the real winemaking starts the moment they’re off the truck. That has to be the case for a red: fermentation on the skins is what builds color and tannin, and that can’t happen after the fact, so the grapes need to still be whole when they arrive.
Our Washington whites, and everything from New York, arrive already pressed into juice instead. In those situations, it just makes more sense for the grower to press on site rather than ship whole grapes across the country. White wine doesn’t want skin contact anyway, so pressing at origin doesn’t cost us anything in style. It does buy us a lot in quality: skins that get bruised or broken over a multi-day haul can oxidize or pick up unwanted flavor and bacteria before the fruit ever reaches us, and juice simply travels lighter and more stable than whole clusters do. For a long-distance shipment, pressing at the source is often the safer choice for the wine, not just the more convenient one.
Reds and Whites Take Completely Different Paths:
For whatever arrives as whole clusters, red and white wine split off from each other almost immediately, and the order of operations matters.
For whites, the grapes are pressed first, before fermentation even begins. The juice is separated from the skins right away, left to settle so the solids drop out, and only the clear juice goes on to ferment. Skin contact for a white wine is minimal to none by design; that’s part of what keeps it bright and clean rather than tannic.
For reds, it works the other way around. The grapes are crushed and go into the fermenter skins and all. Fermentation happens on the skins, with the cap of skins and seeds that rises to the top punched down or pumped over regularly to keep pulling color, tannin, and flavor into the wine. Only once fermentation is finished, or very close to it, do we press the wine off the skins.
That single difference, press first versus press last, is one of the more important decisions in how a red and a white end up so different from each other, long before either one sees a barrel.
Not every wine stays on its own path all the way to the bottle, either. Some of our wines are single-varietal, but others are blends, built by combining lots from different grapes or even different regions to bring out a balance no single varietal could reach on its own. Blending is its own kind of tasting decision, made after fermentation and often after some time in barrel, once we know what each lot actually has to offer.
This Work Is Physical:
People tend to picture winemaking as elegant. The wine can be. The work that makes it isn’t.
Fermentation and aging mean moving hoses and pumps, lifting and rolling full barrels, standing on a wet crush pad for hours, and scrubbing tanks by hand between every batch. It’s hard, physical, often unglamorous work, done in cold cellars and on early mornings, week after week through the fall.
At LaBelle, that work is led entirely by women.
LaBelle winemaker Melaney Shepard and I are both out here doing it ourselves, alongside our team, not just directing it from a desk. It’s not something we talk about often, but it’s part of who we are and how this wine gets made.
Then Comes Aging:
Once fermentation and pressing are done, a wine is young, not necessarily finished. Some wines are meant to stay bright and fresh in stainless steel. Others move into barrels to keep developing. Some are bottled young. Others need months, sometimes much longer, before we believe they’re ready.
Fermentation is relatively fast, and it shows. Aging is slow, and it doesn’t, which is exactly why people underestimate it.
A barrel room looks quiet from the doorway, and that’s misleading.
Nothing about what’s happening inside those barrels is still. A wine that tasted sharp and disjointed the week it went in can, months later, taste like something else entirely, its edges rounded off, new aromas showing up that weren’t there before. Some of that is time. Some of it is the barrel itself, its age and toast and how long we let the wine sit in it.
But more oak isn’t the goal. We’re not trying to flavor the wine, we’re trying to get out of its way long enough for it to become what that fruit was always capable of being.
Science Alongside the Craft:
Behind every tasting decision, our lab is tracking the numbers that tell us what’s actually happening in the tank.
We’re checking pH and titratable acidity, which together tell us how balanced and stable a wine will be, since one measures intensity and the other measures the actual acid content that shapes taste. For our reds, we track malolactic fermentation, the secondary conversion that softens sharper malic acid into rounder lactic acid, until it’s fully complete. And before anything is bottled, wine is screened for the kind of microbial issues, like unwanted wild yeast or bacteria, that can undo months of careful work in a matter of days.
None of that replaces the tasting. It just means that by the time we taste, we already know what we’re tasting for.
How Do We Know When a Wine Is Ready?
Eventually, the numbers step aside and we just taste.
We’re checking for balance: how the aroma, flavor, and texture hold together from the first sip through the finish. Sometimes the answer is yes. Sometimes it’s not yet, and that’s a real answer, not a delay.
A wine doesn’t become ready because a certain number of months passed on a calendar. Different wines develop at different rates, and the same wine can behave differently from one vintage to the next depending on what that year’s fruit gave us. So we keep tasting until the wine tells us.
Minimal Intervention Doesn’t Mean Leaving Wine Alone:
At LaBelle, we describe our approach as Clean Crafted Minimal Intervention Winemaking, and that phrase gets misread constantly as “put it in a tank and walk away.” It’s really the opposite.
Minimal intervention means we’re not making unnecessary changes to a wine, and knowing what’s unnecessary requires knowing exactly what’s happening with that wine at every stage, from the moment it’s pressed through every month it spends aging. That takes real attention: monitoring, tasting, meticulously clean equipment, careful temperature control. When the best thing we can do for a wine is give it more time, that’s the decision we make, deliberately.
Grapes reflect the place they were grown and the season they grew in. Fruit picked here in a New Hampshire fall isn’t going to taste like fruit ripened under a Washington summer, and it shouldn’t. We’re trying to make the best wine we can from what each region’s fruit gave us that year.
Bottling Happens On the Wine’s Schedule:
Bottling is the last stop, and we treat it that way. A wine gets bottled when it’s ready, not because a date on the calendar says it should be. We never force a bottling to meet a schedule. If a wine needs another month in barrel, it gets another month in barrel, and the bottling line waits.
A Lighter Footprint, By Design:
Minimal intervention runs alongside a broader effort to keep our footprint small, in the cellar and out in the vineyard. We compost the biomass that comes off the crush pad, clean tanks with low-water, low-energy equipment, and lean on a filtering system that gets the job done in a fraction of the time and water that traditional methods require.
“Every decision we make, from vineyard to cellar, is a step towards a more sustainable and environmentally-conscious winemaking process,” says winemaker Melaney Shepard.
One Vintage Makes Way for the Next:
Eventually the cycle comes back around. A wine that arrived as grapes one fall reaches bottling, or moves into barrel to keep aging, right around the time a new harvest is arriving behind it.
There’s rarely a single moment when everything is finished at once. One vintage is being bottled while another ages in barrel. A new harvest is coming in while we’re still tasting wine from the last one.
So the next time you see harvest photos, know that picking the grapes is only the visible part of a much longer story: a community gathered before sunrise, fruit split into two very different paths the moment it hits the crusher, wine moving into barrel and bottle, and wine from earlier vintages quietly becoming what it’s going to be.
