Well sampling is on in earnest with perfect weather ensuring ripening is happening very quickly.  Having already mentioned how early the season is this year, sugar accumulation is well and trully ahead of flavour development and physiological ripeness i.e. seed and tannin ripeness.

Last week I conducted a preliminary test on berries while walking through the vineyard using a hand held refractometer.  This week I thought it was time to ask the real question “How sweet are they?” It involved taking a random sample of whole bunches across each of the blocks of Merlot and Viognier and crushing the berries.

 The density of the juice is measured using an hydrometer and the temperature is taken in order to make any adjustments to the final reading and measure the sugar content using an hydrometer.

Having increased from the previous week the Viognier had a Baume reading of 12.8 and the Merlot was 12.7Be. The Baume reading is a density value and has an approximate relationship to the final alcohol reading in the wine. Therefore 1Be will translate to approximately 1% of alcohol in the final wine.

The final juices did vary a little in colour with the greener of the Viognier juices being from grafted vines, while the more yellow being from the vines on their own roots.  the Merlot juice is obvious.

The next job was to to taste all the juices to monitor flavour development. With Viognier the flavours come in quite late during ripening, while for Merlot it is crucial that any green characters are completely gone.  So what I am seeking for both varieties is ripenss, ripeness and ripeness!

From all this I would be thinking that harvest is still about two weeks away, depending on how much rain we received over the past day or two and whether the vine has taken any of it up. This could result in a slight reduction in over all sugar levels. I’ll keep you posted.

Vineman

Technorati Tags: refractometer, Merlot, Viognier, hydrometer, density, Baume

This entry was posted on Thursday, March 1st, 2007 at 2:32 pm and is filed under Vineman, Gherardi Vineyard, Season Predictions. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.