Grand Harvest Awards; What's it all about?

Recently Harbinger’s 2009 Bolero, a 75% Tempranillo blend and the 2010 Barbera were awarded medals at the Grand Harvest Awards 2013. Wineries from all over the North Americas enter this competition from Canada to New York to New Mexico and the top 2 wine-producing states: California and Washington. This particular competition focuses on “terroir”. 

So what is terroir and why is it so important? Terroir, the French word for land, can be described as characteristics from a certain area that interact with plant genetics giving you a “sense of the land”. Wherever the grapes are grown, the geography, geology and climate give a unique quality to the grapes. So no matter what, it is impossible to reproduce the same wine flavor. Grand Harvest Awards lets the wine tell the history of the area from which it came and judges based on which wines stay true to its history. 

At Harbinger, we get our Tempranillo grapes from the Rattlesnake Hills area which has loamy soil, lots of slopes, meaning great drainage,  average rainfall of 6-9”, and a long growing season.  We get our Barbera from the Columbia Valley AVA which is the largest wine region in the state and it is broken down into several smaller AVA’s including Rattlesnake Hills. The Columbia Valley has many microclimates but the whole region is known for having cold winters and long dry summers with low humidity. All of these attributes affect how the grapes will taste. How? Well, you’ll just have to try our Gold-winning Barbera and Silver-winning Bolero for yourself.

Here’s a good example: In 2012 there were huge forest fires over in Eastern Washington, where food and grapes for wine-making are grown. Now that 2012 wines are coming out onto the market, spectators have been saying these 2012 vintage wines are displaying a particularly smokey flavor as compared to other years. Those forest fires affected the flavor of the grapes, therefore the wine which the grapes made and that’s just one of the thousands of factors that influences terroir.

For the whole list of wineries that won awards visit this website
https://www.enofileonline.com/compawards.aspx?compID=91