California's wine grape harvest is nearly over and indications are that the 2014 vintage will continue the state's recent string of high-quality vintages.

"We're in the home stretch," said Jon Emmerich, winemaker at Napa's Silverado Vineyards. "Most wineries in Napa should be done by next week. Our Cabernet Sauvignon is about 40 percent of what we produce and I'm very pleased with how it looks, and really happy with the vintage as a whole."

Napa Valley and Sonoma, in the north of California, enjoyed early harvests after fairly mild growing seasons. To the south, Paso Robles also experienced an early harvest, hastened by warmer than usual weather.

Napa, in particular, experienced a disquieting series of recent events. After a 6.0 earthquake in August that left many shell-shocked, and a rare hailstorm in September, the mood in the Napa Valley was tense.

"After the earthquake and the hail, people were in a weird fog, but when the fruit started ripening everybody had a job to do and we just did it. Now we're looking forward to wrapping up. We've been so busy it almost seems like the earthquake is a distant memory," added Emmerich.

Trefethen Vineyards suffered some of the worst earthquake damage to an 1886 wooden building that housed a tasting room and was listed on the National Register of Historic Places. It's unclear whether the building can be saved. "But we're all still making wine," said Hailey Trefethen. "We brought in grapes later in the same week that the earthquake hit. What would have hurt more is if something had happened in the vineyards."

Winemakers in Napa reported minimal effects on grape quality from the state-wide drought. What rain there was in Sonoma, Napa and Mendocino seems to have hit in the right places at the right times.

"There have been surprisingly few effects of the drought in Napa," said Dawnine Dyer, co-owner of Dyer Vineyards. "We had about half the normal rainfall but if we were only going to get that little rain, we got it all at the right times in the season. We didn't have to rely on a lot of stored water – we dodged a bullet."

Dyer said it was too early to talk about the structure of 2014 Cabernet Sauvignon, but reported: "beautiful flavors, luscious aromas, good color – a good foundation for a great vintage. We've got what we need to work with".

In Paso Robles, 250 miles south of Napa and Sonoma, vintners are 75 percent through the 2014 harvest, which is expected to finish in about three weeks. It was an unusually warm year, says winegrower Dana Merrill, who added that an expedited growing season may have been due to the drought and a lack of cloudy days since the spring.

Merrill, president of Paso Robles-based Mesa Vineyard Management, reported: "small berries that should produce intensely flavored wines, with good color in red wines".