Rising Brix

With this year’s black rot causing only limited damage and the birds seemingly accepting that they’ve eaten every possible grape they can reach without being caught in the protective net, it’s finally starting to feel like I might actually be harvesting my first crop this year. 

I’ve never picked grapes before, much less ones I’ve spent three years nurturing, so the prospect is a little nerve racking.  And, like most first attempts in my winemaking education, I’m relying on my books to show me how it’s done.  For the past several weeks the ripening grapes have been undergoing a chemical metamorphosis as the intense acidity level slowly dissipates and the sweet sugar content slowly increases.  The trick then, is to harvest your grapes at the precise moment when the sugar and acidity have reached that perfect equilibrium leading to the ideal balanced wine. 

For red wines, textbooks say that moment arrives when your sugar content is in the range of 20 to 24 degrees brix and your total acidity is in the range of 6 to 7 grams per liter.  I have a kit that measures total acidity, but it’s a tad cumbersome, imprecise, and uses more of my precious juice than I would prefer, so so far I’ve been focusing my measurements on the sugar level, which can be easily calculated by applying a few drops of juice to my handy refractometer (shown here).  Over the last four weeks, the sugar content has steadily increased from an average brix calculation of 13.5, to 15.3 to 18.5 (the last big jump was because I was on vacation for a week and therefore not able to measure).  With a rate of increase of about 1.7 brix per week, my grapes should be right in the desired sugar range in about two weeks. 

The prudent thing at that point would be to check the acidity level before I harvest, but I know myself well enough to know that by that time, I’ll be too excited to do anything but pick those puppies and bring them home.  Besides, I can always adjust the acidity level in the winemaking process if I have to, and one of the few good things about having an imperfect palate is that you are less offended by an imperfectly balanced wine.

Judgment of LaFollette

When I was on vacation with several of my old high school friends a couple weeks ago, I had the opportunity to conduct my first ever blind tasting of Dry Run wines interspersed with wines from commercial wineries.  The results were telling.  I randomly provided each of the 12 participating adults with blind tastes of the following seven wines:

2008 Dry Run Pinot Noir                                                                              

2009 Dry Run Pinot Noir                                                                              

2009 Francis Copolla Chadonnay

2009 Angeline Pinot Noir                                                                              

2010 Dry Run Chardonnay                                                                           

2010 Dry Run Pinot Noir                                                                              

2010 Dry Run Malbec                                                                                   

I then asked each of the participants to rank the wines in order of preference, first through seventh.  The bottle with the lowest average ranking (i.e. the most preferred) was the Angeline Pinot Noir, with the Francis Copolla Chardonnay coming in second.  These are two wines you can find for $15 or less at most any local wine store.  Most of my wines averaged about the same score in the middle of the pack, with the 2008 Pinot Noir, which I’ve been bad mouthing for years, taking its deserved place in last. 

Interestingly, this year’s Malbec (which I’m disappointed with) actually scored better than this year’s Chardonnay (which I’m pretty pleased with).  While some of that can be credited to the fact that I had only one full bodied wine to offer several anti-white, cabernet drinkers, it does suggest that I might delay the writing of that acceptance speech I had planned for the Chardonnay I’m entering in next month’s amateur winemaking competition. 

More than one person told me afterwards that in hindsight they felt badly having chosen the commercial wines over my own, but I honestly wasn’t disappointed by the results.  For one thing, my grapes all had to travel thousands of miles to get to my house, which is never going to produce ideal results.  For another thing, this is my dry run after all.  If I already thought I was a great winemaker, then I would be trying to make wine for a living.  It’s like I told one of my friends.  Would you apologize to me if you told me you liked the shirt you bought for $15 at Old Navy better than the one I made you myself from home.  No.  Because I don’t know how to make shirts.  But if I practiced hard enough, someday I might.  And in the meantime, you’d better wear that sucker with pride.

Birds Attack!

I recently returned from a week vacation expecting to find that the grapes in my yard had turned from green to purple in my absence.  Instead, I found that I had no grapes at all, save four measly green grapes on an otherwise empty cluster.  I quickly called my sister to check on the six vines at her house, and with the flock of robins circling her backyard it didn’t take long to deduce that my vines were under attack. 

I had read about the threat of birds to vines over the years, but like my black rot the season before, apparently it took firsthand experience to cause me to act upon it.  Fortunately, since the vines at my sister’s house tend to be a few days later in their cycle, those grapes were still in the process of turning to a plump and delicious purple, and therefore might still be salvaged.

Tony, Assistant Bird-Netting Installer

My sister and brother-in-law promptly bought and installed a bird netting that covers and encloses the grapes and foliage, yet is barely visible from more than a few feet away.  After a few birds attempted kamikaze runs and entangled themselves in the netting, we finally got the net tight enough to keep the pests out and for the most part keep my harvest intact. 

As you’ll see from these pictures, just a couple days later the grapes had turned completely purple and are already sweet to eat.  But table grapes aren’t what I’m after, and baring another unforeseen attack, I might actually be just a few weeks away from harvesting my first crop.