This issue goes to press as West Coast grapegrowers and winemakers scramble to manage a harvest that’s throwing them multiple challenges, from mildew to dehydration to potential smoke taint. For some varieties and some regions, it’s the most difficult vintage in several years, and in California the size of the crop is likely to be significantly smaller than 2016.

As always, conditions vary from state to state, county to county and variety to variety. It appears that the effects of the excessive rain last winter and spring and the heat spikes in summer are stressing Lodi growers more than most, while in coastal counties the Cabernet Sauvignon harvest, not yet fully underway, does not seem to be adversely affected. Similarly, the size of the crop in the San Joaquin Valley looks smaller than average, but in the North Coast counties it looks good.

Read the “Top Story” this month for a broad synopsis of the harvest situation by senior editor Andrew Adams with help from Northwest correspondent Peter Mitham and contributing editor Jane Firstenfeld.

“Bottles & Labels” is the theme of this issue, and it’s become a big and growing theme almost everywhere in the wine business. Faced with more and more competition from both domestic and imported brands, North American wineries have dramatically shed their packaging inhibitions to push their products forward on store shelves and search engines.

Recognizing this trend more than four years ago, Wines & Vines hosted the first wine packaging conference. The idea was to help educate winery owners and staff on the subject and bring together marketers, designers and packaging suppliers.

A year later we added the Wine Packaging Design Awards to further encourage and recognize all the great innovation and creativity that was going on. We had looked around and found dozens of wine-quality award programs, of course, but no serious, professional judging of wine packaging. We decided that a stand-alone, juried awards program could serve our readers well.

The awards program has grown quickly in terms of participation, and our team has worked hard to make it easy for wineries to enter while steadily refining the judging process with a focus on independent, very knowledgeable judges to review every entry and select the winners. You'll find those winners in managing editor Kate Lavin's article "Series Entry Claims Top Prize."

This issue also has three meaty articles for winemakers and one for purchasing managers. Winemakers should check out “Best Gas Management Practices at Bottling” to improve quality control, and read the Technical Spotlight on the construction and equipping of the new Napa Valley winery by the founders of Araujo Estate. Those interested in Riesling will appreciate a deep comparative study on “Regional Typicity of Cool Climate Rieslings.”

An article with an especially concrete take-away message for the purchasing manager or whoever buys the barrels at your winery is “Analyzing French Oak Barrel Purchasing Decisions.”

Please read on to find more news, industry economic indicators, thought-provoking columns and other articles too numerous to highlight here. That is, if you have any time to read while in the middle of harvest. If not, we do hope that vintage 2017 turns out to be a good one for you, and that you’ll catch up on your reading as soon as possible.