Hello and Welcome,
We just saw our first legitimate “Blazing” pink wine
berries that signal The Great Cluster Pluck of 2017 is no longer just an
abstract notion, it’s really gonna happen! Sure they are small, but there are
enough ¼ pound clusters out there to make up about 75 tons. Yeah, that’s about
600,000 clusters of wine berries. So, ah, what are you doing the first couple
weeks of Octo-Vember?
But there was also some “Fake News.” Every once
in a while some mauve colored wine berries catch your eye and you think, wow
they are really starting to color up quick. Of course we are talking about
Pinot Noir, not Chardonnay. Mauve colored Chardonnay is what we see at the end
of the season with just a Mother’s touch of Botrytis.
These dark wine berries are “push outs” or in
today’s vernacular “Fake News.” This is how it happens. As the wine berries on
the cluster start to increase in size, there is just not enough room on the
stem to hold them all. Eventually, a set of 5 or 6 wine berries get pushed away
from the stem by the other wine berries and they break the vascular connection
to the stem. When that happens, they desiccate and turn purple. Their
development is arrested at that point and they will never ripen. While this is
an unfortunate event, it is not uncommon. Nothing personal, just farming.
Now consider that other vine fruit that everyone
who doesn’t read our FLOG thinks is a vegetable. The ubiquitous tomato can be
separated from the mother vine and the fruit will ripen up just fine. Not so
with wine berries. Once you cut them, you own them and they will not continue
to develop aroma and flavor or sugar for that matter. So we invest a little
extra time to be sure. Think twice and cut once.
The first real blazing wine berry was spotted on
Julian Calendar day 218 in block 25, which is Dijon clone 777 grafted onto
44-53 rootstock (August 6th, 2017.) This is a couple weeks later
than the past three inferno-like vintages. However, August 2017 has crossed the
104 degree line more than once. We think this was the coaxing these wine berries
needed to show “a little skin.”
Kindest Regards,
Dena & Ernie
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