2026 Harvest Trends and How to Handle Them

The 2026 vintage did not seem easy for many DGW clients, and I wonder if that is the case for you, as well. In some regions, harvest demanded a lot of careful deliberation. In others, it called for quick, decisive calls to keep pace with a compressed, intense picking window. Compared to 2025, 2026 was a wildly different vintage year. 

Denise Gardner Winemaking serves wineries across the United States, from New Jersey to the West Coast AVAs that stretch from Washington down through California. That reach gives me the fortunate opportunity to “see” many harvest seasons – not all of them, but plenty! One thing I’ve learned is that many people don’t realize that aren’t facing these challenges alone. Someone else is often dealing with the very same thing, just states away. 

Here are the trends I saw throughout the various regions I serve, along with solutions to help you get through these challenges in future vintages.

Compressed or Intense Picking/Harvest Periods

Compressed harvest seasons are usually driven by extreme weather, such as consistent heavy rainfall or a prolonged stretch of hot, dry conditions. This isn’t the first vintage I’ve seen this trend, but it did appear more sporadically in 2026, isolated to a few of the regions where I consult. 

Several things make compressed seasons challenging. The biggest is finding enough tank space to manage everything coming into the winery. When weather drives the timeline, harvest can also collide with other time-demanding operations like bottling. (This is why I often recommend finalizing the bottling schedule at least a month or two before harvest is expected to start. See the DGW Winemaker’s Pre-Harvest Prep Checklist, here, for more information.)

Tank logistics leave many winemakers or general managers stressed. Most wines require two tanks or vessels over the course of harvest, and storing finished wine in half-full tanks creates its own can wine quality risks: faster spoilage, accelerating sulfur dioxide depletion, and diminishing varietal character, to name a few.

These periods also take a heavy toll on staff,  with grapes hitting the crush pad so frequently. This is often where shortcuts creep into the winery: skipping essential cleaning operations, sanitizing less often or less thoroughly, delaying pressings, neglecting fermentation monitoring tasks, avoiding key wine chemistry assessments, and more. None of it is malicious. People are simply exhausted. But in this situation, things start to go wrong, usually very quickly. 

The Solution

First, if you went through a compressed harvest, know that you are not alone. Most winemakers I work with experience seasons like this periodically, or more often than they’d like depending on their region. Let that be encouraging: you can borrow lessons from others who have been through it.

The primary fix is better planning. I know, it’s painfully boring! But planning is what saves people in these crunch harvests. What does better planning include? 

• Follow the DGW Winemaker’s Pre-Harvest Prep Checklist (available to DGW Members and Clients): This comprehensive list goes through the cellar activities and operations that will make the harvest easier for everyone. Not a DGW Member? My Post-Harvest Review Checklist is available to everyone and is a solid first step toward better preparation. 
• Prepare for Wine Sampling: Again, simple, but boring. Gather your juice/wine sample containers. If you plan to send samples to a wine lab during harvest, get your shipping boxes set aside and ready. Often the biggest hurdles are small steps between point A and point B. 
• Know What Wines You’re Making: Some regions will need flexibility if the weather turns challenging, but the best wineries always have contingency plans. Even so, I am surprised every vintage how many winemakers decide “what wine to make” after the grapes have already been inoculated. For some wines, yeast selection or starting sugar concentration can shape what the wine becomes. Know what you want before the fruit arrives, and have a production plan to get there. (Bonus tip: In the DGW Elite Membership, I can help you make your production plans during our monthly Q&A’s!) 
• Train Your People: Harvest is not the time to teach someone how to calibrate a pH meter or run a pump. After day one, harvest should run like clockwork. The way to get there is to train employees on harvest equipment and protocols before grapes hit the crush pad. 
• Know When a “Shortcut” is Okay: Many decisions  “feel” right in the moment, but end up creating extra work or limiting what you can do with the wine. For example, adding sulfur dioxide to a red wine after primary fermentation and then inoculating for malolactic fermentation. The intent was good: many do this to try and reduce spoilage risk while MLF progresses. But… this decision just made for a difficult MLF. Another I see often is pressing white wine grapes and letting the juice sit at cellar temperatures (around 60-65°F) for 2 – 4 days until someone can “get to it” or to “improve settling.” Unfortunately, during this time, the juice is highly vulnerable to spoilage or spontaneous fermentation. If your team is overwhelmed, it’s better to choose an alternative stopping point, and that can be decided before harvest begins. 

Pre-planning isn’t hard, but it may require some coaching. If you and your team is ready to get through harvest without the chaos and exhaustion, join our DGW Elite Membership group today. It’s the most affordable consulting option I offer, with access to review harvest planning reviews and discussions on preparation strategies that will work for your winery. 

High YANs in Fruit

This was an odd vintage in which I found myself addressing high YANs in a variety of grape varieties across the country. While it wasn’t true for every region, I saw it more often than usual, especially YANs above 300 mg N/L. 

I offer a free review on how unpredictable YANs can be and how wineries can address it in the winery: read the YAN Primer, here. However, when YANs go beyond typical high concentrations, it becomes very challenging for winemakers to know how to approach nutrient supplementation during primary fermentation.

The Solution

Beyond understanding how to manage YAN in the winery, many winemakers facing very high YANs changed their wine yeast selections this year. For traditional winemakers, switching yeast strains may feel blasphemous. But practically speaking, finding a strain suited to high-nitrogen musts that you can rely on can reduce work later by minimizing hydrogen sulfide development. It also protects the varietal character that everyone works so hard to achieve. 

Strain selection is only half of the solution. The second half is managing nutrient supplementation appropriately for the fermentation. This is where many winemakers need the most help. If you want to test your YAN skills, try my free YAN Worksheet, here. 

Need more assistance? DGW is here to help!

Low Sugars, High pH, and High TA’s… All at the Same Time

For all the years winemakers have insisted that measuring titratable acidity (TA) isn’t necessary, the 2026 vintage is proving them wrong. 

Many, many winemakers came to me this year confused about picking schedules and pre-fermentation additions. They were facing lower-than-normal sugar concentrations, pHs that felt higher than previous vintages, and TAs that refused to drop over time. Yikes! This is a challenging problem for any winemaker. With red wines especially, frustration can set in. Bringing TA down to a more normal range while avoiding high pH is key to red wine stability and taste profiles, and this vintage made that goal seem difficult. 

The Solution

I tell all of my clients this when they get sheepish about adding sugar: just add the sugar. In those states that allow it, chaptalization helps with product consistency. It makes no sense to consumers if your Cabernet Sauvignon is 10% ABV on year and 13.5% ABV the next. Consistency is one of the essential factors for wine quality success in the U.S., and chaptalization helps you achieve it. 

The acids are the bigger challenge.

My first recommendation: if you aren’t already, learn how to measure TA. Most people who insist TA isn’t a problem for their wines are blind to the fact they have a problem. I’d love to tell them, but when I do, I get written off immediately. 😉 (I know there are readers out there smiling at this right now!)

Having the extra information may feel overwhelming, but it actually lets us make more strategic decisions. For some DGW clients, we looked at TAs of their red wines bottle, the blends that comprised them, and then the TAs of the individual varietals. That let us decide when to deacidify pre-fermentation and when to leave something alone, all in the name of consistency. (To those who say this is too manipulative or unnatural: that may be fine for small batch ferments. But for most wineries, sales keep the business running, and consistent wine drives repeat sales. Sometimes the natural thing is to make a good-tasting product that the people want to drink. Know your market, and don’t let someone else’s market assessment for their brand define your needs.)

High Malic Acid Retention

Excessively high malic acid retention showed up in both red and white wine grape varieties, and it was most common among my Midwest clients in the 2026 vintage. Again, some regions did not experience this, but many did.

Malic acid retention is tricky grape chemistry to address during winemaking. Once malic acid reaches high enough concentrations, in can inhibit malolactic fermentation (MLF) altogether. That’s a difficult situation for any winemaker, especially when the wine style depends on MLF (e.g., most red wines). 

The Solution

The first step is learning how to measure malic acid if you work in a region known for high retention. Just as with TA, knowing the malic acid concentrations lets you make decisions during fermentation that help deplete it, keeping in mind that MLF alone is sometimes not accessible. 

From there, the path forward is specific to your fruit. 

How much malic acid can reduce will depend on the wine style (i.e., what kind of wine you are trying to make) and the starting malic acid concentration of that ferment. 

Yeast selection, bacterial selection, and inoculation timing all influence malic acid reduction, and they also shape mouthfeel, aroma, and flavor. The right combination for a high-malic acid Marquette is not the right combination for a high-malic acid Itasca. A mismatch can leave you with a stuck MLF or a wine that never recovers its fruit character. This is where I spend a lot of time with clients, building the plan around the fruit’s starting chemistry and the winemaker’s target style. Done well, and it opens up styles that weren’t possible in regions five years ago (i.e., a less sour, fruit-driven white wine!), and now we have tools that can get us from a starting point of 8 g/L malic acid and result in dryness weeks later. 

Prevalence of Protein Instabilities in White Wines

For some winemaking regions, protein instability in white wines is a real challenge. We can sometimes stabilize proteins in these varieties (e.g., Itasca, La Crescent, La Crosse, Frontenac Gris, Brianna) at around 20 lbs./1,000 gallons of bentonite (I know, it’s a lot). But some varieties grown in certain regions across the U.S. are known to never reach protein stability under our current testing strategies and within reasonable bentonite dosage rates. 

The problem: this, leaves the white wines at risk of falling short of brilliant clarity or hazing unexpectedly. 

The Solution

Well, the bad news is… I don’t have a perfect solution for this one yet. Several of us who work across state lines know this problem exists, and right now we have no standardized recommendation for a product that better stabilizes proteins in these varieties. 

The good news is that the clients I work with who face this problem have a committed consumer base willing to accept some protein instability. That doesn’t mean we ignore it. We still work to minimize the risk. Anecdotally, we’ve learned that for these varieties bentonite additions during fermentation seem to make the problem worse. Using current bentonites available, we usually agree to treat post-fermentation with high doses of bentonite, even when testing doesn’t show stability at that rate. It’s the most likely way to minimize haze, even if a slight haze develops later. 

I’d love to give you a perfect solution for this problem. But for some of the issues winemakers see in different regions, perfect solutions simply don’t exist yet. I say this because the winemaking community at large loves to offer opinions and quick fixes that often fix nothing. Their recommendations are just delivered with confidence. 

The Takeaway

Many of these trends aren’t one-offs. They’re real problems that many people manage, and they can influence wine quality in ways textbooks don’t discuss.

If you find yourself dealing with some of these trends and want help addressing them, consider joining the DGW Community today. We’re here to help… and we do! You can see DGW success stories, here.

The views and opinions expressed through dgwinemaking.com are intended for general informational purposes only. Denise Gardner Winemaking does not assume any responsibility or liability for those winery, cidery, or alcohol-producing operations that choose to use any of the information seen here or within dgwinemaking.com.