07/27/2026
Across Northern California, shatter showed up early this season.
Warm bloom. Cold, windy stretches. Uneven set.
Most vineyard teams can see it in the field: gaps in the cluster, blocks coming in lighter than expected, and fruit that simply isn’t where the forecast said it would be.
Shatter impacts yield, but it can also affect quality when set is uneven and ripening becomes less consistent.
The harder questions are:
How big is the impact?
And where is it happening?
When growers can answer those questions early, they can adjust production planning, refine yield forecasts, prioritize sampling, and act faster in the field. In some cases secure additional fruit to hit their production targets.
For much of the industry, that answer is still a guess. A gut-feel percentage. A vineyard-wide haircut. A number that gets folded into the forecast without really showing where the loss happened.
Shatter is driven by weather at bloom, but it doesn’t hit evenly.
It varies by variety, block, zone, and sometimes row by row.
That’s why it needs to be measured spatially, not averaged away.
More this week on what shatter really costs, and why “we think it’s down a bit” isn’t enough.