The heat returned with a vengeance this week, driving temperatures into the triple digits for a couple of days and otherwise being reminiscent of mid-summer in the Foothills.  The heat caused some incremental ripening, but also inevitable dehydration, inflating both brix and TA.

We have met all of our commitments for primitivo and–crop estimation being a fine art that we’re still learning–have about 0.75 tons still remaining in the field.  Given that we committed a little over 5 tons, this suggests that we were right on target for yield at about 2 tons/acre.  The grapes are still usable for dry wine given a healthy TA level, but time is short due to the recent spike in sugar.  After this weekend (Oct. 2-3), the remaining fruit would be most suitable for dessert wine applications, e.g. late harvest or port-style.  Our 2008 homemade wine produced with primitivo from this field won a gold medal, Best of Class at the 2010 Amador County Fair.

The barbera is coming along steadily, and though we have suffered some inevitable attrition from dehydration, there is still plenty of good, plump fruit available for harvest.  Over the past 6 weeks, we have gone back through a second time and dropped some main crop and most seconds from all of Block 4 and select sections of the rest of the barbera vineyard.  Due to time constraints, we have only been sampling Block 4 until now, but will begin wider sampling soon.  We expect that–depending on the irrigation block and client preference/schedules–this fruit will be ready for picking in 1 to 3 weeks.  We hope that the long hang time has been beneficial for flavor development, and we will continue to irrigate proactively to try to keep the brix in check.  Moderating temperatures forecast for the coming week are good news for nice ripening of this fruit.

As we had no takers for the Quinta (thanks for saving it for us!), we will be harvesting this wonderful fruit over the next several weeks and posting any leftovers for sale on this website.  This fruit will be available only in home winemaker-type quantities (hundreds of pounds) and will be picked at a ripeness suitable for dessert wine.

Separate from the Quinta fruit, we have about a ton of touriga from vines that we grafted over from another varietal last year.  This fruit was not cropped as sparingly as the Quinta touriga and so is a couple weeks behind in ripeness, but is coming along nicely and available at a discount relative to the touriga nacional in our Quinta.  It makes a dark, fragrant wine, and is suitable for dry and (at higher ripeness) dessert wine applications.

Please see our latest grape chemistry posting on this blog for recent chemistry sampling information for all of the above grapes.

We’re in the home stretch now, and it will be a race to ripen the grapes before cool and wet weather ensues.  We had a little more heat than expected last week, followed by another nice blast of autumn, and only moderate heat is forecast in the coming week.  We would be surprised if it suddenly got warm now; the pattern of an overall cool year seems likely to continue.  Fortunately, our location above the fog but at the lower end of the altitude range (~1500′) for our viticultural area should put us in an enviable position for ripening our fruit in what has been reported to be a challenging year for grape growing in coastal areas of the state.

Grape chemistry readings, which we started last week for our earliest ripening varieties, give us a pretty good idea of where we stand on harvest. We were a bit surprised by the acid levels last week in the primitivo, but they’ve come down nicely this week, brix are rising, and pH confirms the ripening trend.  We think that we’re still 2-3 weeks out for the primitivo, depending on where specific clients like their fruit.  Our nets on about 40% of this crop have birds concentrating their grazing in the un-netted rows, which not coincidentally is where we have been sending our golden retriever for entertainment.

For barbera, we focused our sampling on our earliest ripening and lowest yielding block to get a fix on where the barbera stands.  Brix in the barbera are farthest along of any of our varietals, the pH is above 3 (we’ll take it–often our first reading of the year for barbera is not!), and TA is still characteristically high.  On the basis of brix alone this block will be in a range that some like within 2 weeks, but the TA will likely require another 3 weeks to get in a reasonable range. Other blocks would be slightly behind and are looking like mid-October harvests.

The tempranillo made somewhat disappointing progress on brix this week, but showed evidence of ripening in the drop in TA and rise in pH.  This is  a characteristically low acid grape, and in port-style blends brings tannin rather than acid to the table.  It looks like we’ve still got a couple weeks to go on the tempranillo, and as we’ve been very successful keeping the birds off it, may be able to hang it for three weeks if needed for the brix.

The touriga nacional, whose juice already has particularly nice flavors, is looking like its normal well-balanced self at this point, with probably 3-4 weeks to go.  We’ve cropped this mainstay grape of the “Quinta” at low levels, and we’re very optimistic on the quality of this fruit.