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Saturday, October 15, 2016

Forgotten Bag of Chardonnay

We are in the vineyard cleanup phase now, with all of our fruit harvested and fermenting in our fermentation chamber. After our harvest, fall tasks include getting the weeds out of the the vineyard row, tethering loose vines and picking up the fall crop of rocks. We had help today which made the job go by in half the time. We then had some time to inspect our vines. In one of the rows of Chardonnay, we found this forgotten bag of Chardonnay.
Since we harvested all of our Chardonnay on September 14th, I wondered what the Brix was on this bunch which has now been on the vine for another month and was left hanging through at least 2 storms that brought 3 inches of rain. When I checked the Brix with the refractometer, it was at 20. This made me think of an experiment that I could do next year. First, I would need to take the Brix of the grapes that I would leave hanging and then come back to it periodically to take the Brix and see if there is an increase in Brix level. It could be that the Brix level reaches a plateau and no matter what further hangtime the grape sees, there is very little return on the investment, and much that could damage the grape. Right now it's a thought experiment, but may be next year, I can implement it.
Meanwhile, it was nice to see that this forgotten bagged grape bunch was still very much intact.

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