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California completed its wine-grape harvest.

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The 1986 wine-grape harvest and crush, completed this week, weighed in at 2.7 million tons, about 4% less than last year. But what the crop lacked in numbers it apparently made up for in quality, said the Wine Institute, a trade group. The growing season got off to a mid-winter start, thanks to an unseasonal warm spell, then cooled off to stretch out the growth and finally ended in August--the earliest finish that many old-timers could recall. Enologist Andre Tchelistcheff, a prominent figure in the California wine industry for nearly 50 years, called the new vintage “very good, very promising.”

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