Ash.

As the idiom goes, "there's no smoke without fire."  There is also no fire without ash - a lot of it - and everything in Napa is covered in ash.

Venturing into Vinoland's Cabernet sauvignon grapes today to perform a sugar sample (22.8 °Brix, they're on a good trajectory), I couldn't help but notice how much ash is on the fruit.  This fiery-growing season, it seems grape-growers have more to worry about than just smoke taint.  I don't recall ash being this much of an issue in the calamitous fires of 2017.  Always something new in farming.  If it isn't an insidious insect infestation, it's a natural disaster. 

The air quality the past three days has been the clearest and most smoke free since the 18th of August, thank goodness.  However, the wind is supposed to shift and bring the smoke back into the Bay Area on Saturday.  A reminder that a lot of California is still on fire.

As with the Pinot grigo, I will have Vinomaker go through the vineyard with a leaf blower, prior to harvest, and try to dislodge some of the ash on the berries.  Not a vineyard operation I ever could have imagined needing to be performed, but clean fruit is the goal.

Tasty grapes.

I probably didn't have to get my refractometer out today and perform a sugar sample of the Pinot grigio (PG).  Nope, I really should have known that the PG grapes were very close to maturity, and thus harvest, by simply observing my chickens' behaviour of late.  Yup, my six girls are really enjoying the ripening grapes.  Rather unfortunate, that.
There is a retaining wall at the top of the PG block and Lizzie, Pansy, Maro, Annie, Rosie and Gracie seem quite content to sit there and snack away to their little hearts' content.  The rachis in the photograph is picked clean, absolutely nekkid.  Full clusters on the far side of the vine that they cannot reach are still intact.  And I thought I had problems with the wild bird population.  Hmmph.
I sampled anyway and the PG is at 23.2 °Brix; the grapes taste fabulous and, what's left of them, look great.  Now, if I could train the chickens to poop only in the vineyard I may overlook their thieving of my hard-farmed crop.

Secondly, Syrah.

I was out and about with my handy dandy refractometer again today, sugar-sampling Vinoland's Syrah grapes.  The fruit looks fantastic, but it isn't ready for harvest yet.  I got a reading of 21 °Brix, and seeing as we don't harvest until the grapes are close to 25 °Brix, we have a bit of a way to go still.  Acidity is lovely, however there's still a little green component in the flavour.  I think it's going to be a good Syrah season.

Through the refractometer window.

Today was the first sugar-sampling of the season.  Using my trusty refractometer, to ascertain the level of sugar in a small sample of Pinot grigio juice, I got a reading of 23.2 °Brix.  A good start, but the flavours aren't quite there yet.
My handheld refractometer is a very useful instrument to have around, it helps makes my job easy.  A large proportion of the soluble solids in grape juice are sugars and it is the ripeness of the fruit (the percentage Brix) that I am trying to determine.  (Fructose and glucose are the main sugars in grape juice, combining as the disaccharide, sucrose.)  The sweeter the juice, the more it will bend the light that passes through it (refraction).  It is the angle of the light, the refractive index, that when viewed through the eyepiece of the refractometer, gives the level, or measurement, of sugar (i.e., grams of sugar per 100 grams of juice) in the sample.  See, easy peasy.  I'll leave the harder part to Vinomaker; determining the acid content and pH.
It is almost harvest time.  I predict I have a busy month ahead of me.

The birds and the bees.

The birds and the bees are in busying themselves with reducing Vinoland's Cabernet Sauvignon crop.  It's not that I begrudge my avian and apian friends a little fresh fruit now and again.  It's just that I can't help but feel a little pang of disappointment at the fact that some of my lovingly pruned and farmed grapes will not get the chance to fulfill their destiny by becoming wine.  I already knew that the minute the local animal population becomes this interested in the fruit, the fruit is ripening.  I really should have taken a sugar sample before today, but I've been a bit busy.
The birds and the bees were correct.  The fruit is rather ripe; the sugar is at 25 °Brix and the seeds are mostly brown.  However, Vinomaker thinks the juice tastes just a little green still.  I don't.  I think the juice tastes simply delicious, typically Cab-like.  Apparently, so do the birds.  And the bees.

The future is mechanical.

As I've said before, I am not a fan of the mechanical method of harvesting grapes; the vines get beat up, the rachis is left behind along with a lot of grapes/raisins (all of which could become inoculum for, e.g., Black Rot) and all that shaking gathers up anything else that may be hanging around in the canopy.  (I noticed that one of Napa County's pest-traps was a casualty of mechanical harvesting in my neighbour's vineyard - it was ripped into shreds.)  However, the local bird population is ecstatic. They probably cannot believe their good fortune in the discovery that someone prepared a giant fruit salad for their delectation.
Ultimately, with labour costs rising at a rate that is not sustainable, in the near-future the mechanical harvesting of grapes will be de rigueur in the vineyards of the Napa Valley. Rumour has it that, in one or two years from now, when TWWIAGE starts to replant certain blocks of their vineyard the vines will be trained harvester-friendly, i.e., bilateral cordons. Machines don't make demands.
On a happier note, I worked in the Cabernet Sauvignon vines for a little while this afternoon - checking for any second crop I may have missed, taming errant shoots and assessing the leaf-pulling situation.  And I took a grape sample to see how sugar accumulation is progressing.  Not bad, at 23 °Brix the fruit tastes lovely and sweet, the seeds are browning nicely and the crop seems to be of average size.  I'd better sharpen my picking knife.

Stunning Syrah.

The Syrah grapes just look beautiful.  Gorgeous. Yes, there is a little tiny bit of puckering of skin on the west facing rows.  And my feathered friends have been helping themselves to the clusters hanging closest to the tree line.  But, generally, the crop looks fantastic.
A grape sampling today revealed that the sugar is at 24 °Brix: climbing nicely despite the cool weather of the past week.  Vinomaker did a quick chemical analysis and the pH is at 3.48, which is a good range for it to be.  The seeds are all brown, so they are mature.  Time to start thinking picking-logistics.

Bitter sweet.

Lurking in the upper canopy of the Syrah vines, like a tiny gathering of purple Christmas tree baubles, are a few small bunches of 'second crop' grapes: mini-clusters of grapes that have developed on lateral shoots.  I thought I'd removed most of these little fellows earlier in the season, but apparently not.  The second crop, that I missed when they were green and under ripe, are now purple, but still under ripe. However, they are so much more visible now. The sign of a healthy and vigorous vine, albeit a tad out of balance, in an ideal world I'd have caught these unwanted clusters earlier in the growing season and dealt with them then.  (In my defence, I am only 5' 5".)  Sigh.
I noticed this particular clusterette today as I performed my first sugar sampling of the season in the Syrah vines.  Visually the fruit is looking great; the sample had about 75% brown seeds and the skin is beginning to give off a little colour.  The sugar came in at 22.8 °Brix.  The Syrah is getting close.
Meanwhile, Vinomaker spent most of his day in mad professor mode, working with the white juice from yesterday.  The Pinot grigio's vital statistics came in at - 26 °Brix, 3.61 pH and 5.25 TA.  Vinomaker has some work to do.

When they're brown, they're done...

A very misty, damp morning (that, once again, wasn't really forecast) did not deter me from taking a sample of Pinot grigio grapes for a quick refractometer measurement.
I'm thinking that the slightly high reading of 25.2 °Brix  is perhaps due to the 106/108 °F temperatures last weekend that could have resulted in a little bit of dehydration.  The grapes are not raisined, the fruit looks absolutely beautiful this year, so I am not too concerned with the elevated sugar level. Besides, some of the seeds are a lot greener than those in the photograph.  And the juice is tasting fabulous. We are very close.  I'd better start thinking logistics.

Brix basics.

Perhaps the most common criteria in determining when to harvest wine grapes is sugar content.  With that in mind, I performed my first °Brix refractometer reading of the Pinot grigio (PG) grapes this morning.  The specific gravity of the soluble solids in a couple of drops of juice (from a random sampling of the PG block) came in at a reading of 23.4 °Brix. Harvest is just around the vino-corner.
Sugar content, however, is not the only determining factor in when to harvest wine grapes.  Visual indicators include the browning of the stems and seeds, both signs of physiological maturation of the berry.  And flavour: old style winegrowers still use taste as a determining factor of grape maturity.  The PG seeds are, I'd estimate, still 25% green.
California is experiencing a bit of a heatwave, so I am aware that my sampling may have had a slightly higher reading due to dehydration. And that's another reason why a °Brix reading is merely one aid in determining when grapes are ready to be harvested.  Stay tuned.

Sugar levels.

I tested the sugar in the Pinot grigio grapes for the first time today. Using a handheld refractometer I took a simple measurement of the fermentable sugars available in a 100 berry sample from the vineyard and came up with a reading of 23.2 °Brix.  Not bad, for starters.
The 2016 growing season has been uncharacteristically cool and rather reminiscent of the 2010 growing season, methinks.  The month of August has been much cooler than is normal, so ripening has slowed down for everyone in the Napa Valley.  But the fruit looks great in Vinoland, so I think the future is looking sweet.

On your marks.

This morning, a quick sugar-sampling of Vinoland's black grapes revealed °Brix of 24.4 for the Cabernet Sauvignon grapes and 24.2 for the Syrah (which surprised me a little).  They're almost neck and neck in the race to harvest which presents a small logistical problem in having to organise two, very close together picking days.  But 2013 has been another great year for growing grapes in the Napa Valley, so I'm not really complaining.
However, I think I may have a little bit of wiggle room; the acid in the Syrah needs to come down a little (otherwise the flavours are great); seed maturity is just a tad off (photograph); and the skins are only just beginning to give off good colour.  The Cabernet Sauvignon, although it has higher sugar than the Syrah at this point, is still showing a soupçon of unwanted herbaceousness about it and, at a push, could possibly hang in there for another two weeks.  Just, maybe.  At least all my feathered friends will be happy about the extended hang time in Vinoland.

Sugar-o-meter.

Today, I decided to test the sugar in Vinoland's grapes.  So I got out my trusty refractometer and off I went in search of sucrose. Measured in degrees Brix, one can ascertain with a refractometer the volume of sugar, a percentage by weight, in an aqueous solution - in this case grape juice. Primarily, I wanted to know how advanced the Pinot grigio grapes were. I knew they were tasting pretty nice, but who am I to gauge whether or not they are ready to harvest by taste alone. The Pinot grigio came in at, a rather surprising, 24.6 degrees.  Erm, Vinomaker, I think we ought to put some thought into harvesting here soonish. However, the Pinot grigio's seeds were not fully brown, so a little more physiological maturity is needed - that'd be hang time.
With 2010 and 2011 being such cool vintages, one could be forgiven for thinking that harvest was still a way off.  But this growing season has been nigh on perfect and all the different grape varieties in Vinoland seem to be maturing at a more normal rate. The Cabernet Sauvignon weighed in at 18.6 degrees and the Syrah was at 19.6 - both varieties' seeds were still partially green. Whilst the Cabernet Sauvignon still displayed the expected vegetal character associated with this variety the Syrah tasted simply marvelous. The 2012 vintage holds such great promise.

Sugar sweet?

Not quite.
Today, I felt brave enough to test the °Brix (°B) in Vinoland's grapes for the first time this season. The Pinot grigio clusters look great, but looks can be deceiving. What stage of maturation are we at with the challenging 2010 vintage? And, just exactly where are we with what could prove to be some possibly elusive sugar levels? I took several readings with a refractometer and got an average of 21.2 °B...not bad. But more important, than merely measuring the sugar content, is how the grapes taste. The Pinot grigio still taste rather tart and the seeds are half brown, half green...not even close to being ready for harvest.
With the weather taking on a distinctive autumnal feel, and the first rain since May forecast for tomorrow, Vinoland is in desperate need of an Indian summer or a miracle.

Lovin' Spoonful.

C6H12O6 is the simple fructose molecule. Adenosine triphosphate (ATP), transports chemical energy derived from photosynthesis within the cells of grape leaves and converts it into sugar.
Today, we tested the sugar in our Syrah grapes for the first time this year. Using a hand-held optical instrument called a refractometer that measures the percentage of soluble solids in plant juice, we measured the grape sugar content in a random sample taken out in the vineyard. We got a reading of 21.8 °Brix. °Brix (°B) is a scale that is used to measure the percentage of sugar in grape juice.
Many growers still rely on sugar readings to decide when their grapes are ripe. However, sugar readings are only one indicator of grape maturity. There are other qualitative and quantitative evaluations that can best predict the optimal time of harvest. Amongst these are; the softening of the berries, the detachment of skin from pulp, brown seeds and stems, the analysis of pH and titratable acidity (TA).  Oh, and taste. Under-ripe, herbaceous flavours are personae non grata in Vinoland, but a °B reading of 24.5 or better is always welcome.
C6H12O6, the inclusion of which in grape juice makes a finished wine so appealing...and the exclusion of which in diet drinks makes Diet Coca-Cola so unappealing.