Special Feature: Ted Osborne, Winemaker's Journal
Dissecting the Vintage, Part 4
A multi-part series from winemaker Ted Osborne of Olabisi Wines sharing harvest notes from the grapefields of Napa Valley.
A Winemaker's Journal, Part 4
That picking knife with the orange handle usually sends the novice picker to the E.R. That's why when we have picking parties, friends of the winery get clippers instead.
Carneros Chardonnay Grapes - The visual essence of the vintage.
Wednesday, October 1, 2008 - While waiting for a red lot to finish its press cycle, I decided to look through some of the photos I have taken so far this vintage. Much more rewarding than surfing the web to keep up on current events, considering the reality of current events these days. And I came across this image, again from the Ceja Chardonnay pick a couple weeks ago. The barrel ferments of this wine are now dry, meaning the yeasts have eaten up all the sugar. The flavors and aromas of the new wine are leaning toward the tropical mango side and yet there's lemon lime too, and brown sugar, almost like a wildly exotic, freshly baked pastry tart, straight from the oven, with some of the overflowing fruit juice bubbling and caramelizing on the hot oven floor.
The flavors and aromas of the new wine are leaning toward the tropical mango side and yet there's lemon lime too, and brown sugar, almost like a wildly exotic, freshly baked pastry tart.
But the reason for including this picture is that I thought it would be a good way to show the character of this particular vintage for this particular vineyard. If you had to make the call on when to pick a vineyard based solely on what you saw and not on what you tasted (the opposite of what we usually do), this particular cluster gives you a lot of visual info. Let's also say that the optimum color for ripe Chardonnay grapes is golden. Toward the outside (right side) of the cluster you can see the golden to past-golden color of the grapes. They're also dimpled a bit. These grapes are a result of the sustained periods of heat we had this vintage. The exposed fruit got really hot and pushed the ripening past what the actual vine contributed. If you measured these with a refractometer they'd read somewhere around 28 Brix. [Brix is a measurement of the dissolved sugar-to-water mass ratio of a liquid.] The entire vineyard picked out at 24 Brix. Then as you scan the cluster, you can see out some lovely golden berries that represent the median for the vineyard, around 25.5 Brix. Now, all the insulated portions of the cluster, the shade side and the interior, are composed of less ripe fruit, greener in color, more acidic in flavor and lower sugar (22.5 Brix).
Pictured at Left: You can see what he's made of. This isn't the first 40-pound pan of Chardonnay he's trucked atop his head today.
To further weigh you down with details, the final decision to pick this vineyard weighs the actual taste results of this and similar clusters, the average Brix of the entire acre of fruit, the physiological ripeness of the fruit (nutty tasting seeds, lush fruit flavors, etc), the health of the vines themselves, and the prevailing weather patterns for the region. Also, as mentioned before, there are always the logistics of harvesting, hauling, and pressing the fruit. But you gotta take all this info and set it aside for a moment in order to focus on the flavor, the taste, and imagining how those flavors translate into the wine you want to make. As with most pursuits, it's the focus on the essence of things that proves to be the most difficult and the most illuminating.
Read the Winemaker's Journal, Part 1.
Read the Winemaker's Journal, Part 2 and 3.
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