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.

Drop some acid?

What's so good about acid, man? If you read the definition of the word acid in a dictionary, it really doesn't sound like anything you'd want to put in your mouth. Chemically, it's a sour-tasting water-soluble compound that can react with a base (alkali) to form a salt. But show me a wine without adequate acid, and I'll show you a wine that's flabby and not very appealing. While too much acidity can be terribly sour, a touch of acid gives wine an appetising, mouth-watering characteristic that can be described as bright, or crisp, or fresh. Of course balance is important, and that bright component must be matched by fruit, but the fact remains that acid is not a negative term when it comes to wine. There are a number of different acids in wine, primarily tartaric (shown above), malic, citric, succinic, and lactic. The sum of these is the total acidity (TA) of a wine which winemakers generally express in grams of acid per 100 millilitres of wine. You don't really need to know all this chemistry to appreciate a good glass of wine but the fact that it exists will make your tongue extremely happy.