Grape Harvest

Monday Sep 21st, 2009 38 Views Vine to Wine

Welcome to Vine to Wine this is your host Linda Moran and as many of you are aware it is a very exciting time of the year in the wine industry. On today’s program we’ll take a look at what’s going on in the vineyards.

It all begins in the vineyards. The saying that “you can’t make good wine from bad grapes” is no wives tale. For without close monitoring and attention to the details of growing grapes, we would almost never have great wines. The grape growing season begins in the spring and goes through the harvest in the late summer and fall. The weather during that season is what we attribute to producing a good vintage or a not so good vintage. So when people talk about a good vintage or year they are telling you what the summer weather was like. A wine grape grower hopes for long summers that will allow the grapes to become good and ripe and they hope that it won’t rain around harvest and cause the grapes to fill up with water and dilute the flavors and the chemical make up of the juice. As grapes grow and ripen during the summer the sugar levels increase. As harvest nears a close watch is kept on the levels of sugar the grapes are holding. The winemakers and oenologists will be in the vineyards measuring the amounts of sugar with an instrument called a refractometer. It tells them the exact level of sugars on any given day. And most likely they will taste the grapes to figure this out too. Remember to send your wine questions to Linda at vine to wine dot net, and thank you for joining me on today’s Vine to Wine.