Texas is enjoying another great year of a quality harvest. The grapes have been harvested along the Gulf Coast and the Texas Hill County. The grapes on the Texas High plains have everyone abuzz about 2020 being another awesome year for Texas! About 80 percent of the Texas grapes are harvested on the flat lands of the Texas High Plains. These flat lands make harvesting grapes easy with mechanical grape harvesters. These machines have vibrating sides on each side of the rows of grape vines guided by a wheeled mechanism. About 100 grape pickers equal the daily output of these mechanical harvesters. With COVID19 and lack of farm hands, Texas is not being impacted unlike California with its steeply sloping vineyards and lack of farm hands during this pandemic. These harvested grapes come into the winery cleaner and faster than hand-harvested grapes. As a result of a faster accumulation of grapes via mechanical harvester, the grapes arrive at the wineries in less than 90 minutes vs. several hours of vineyard storage and accumulation of grapes to justify transportation to the winery by truck. The grapes that arrive faster from mechanical harvest have a temperature about one to two degrees above ambient air temperature. However, grapes that have to reside in the vineyards for hours start fermentation via rogue yeasts and bacteria. Winemakers have no control over these rogue fermentations and sometime have unusual tastes that the winemaker does NOT want to have in his wines. With this type of mechanical harvesting, Texas wineries are experiencing better quality grapes at the winery. Although the final end of the grape harvest is several weeks away, most everyone agrees that Texas is finding its identity and making lots of award-winning wines. As we look into another quality…