Back to Blogging- Véraison Thin

Firstly, Happy 2008.

After a bit of an economics honours thesis/final exams induced blogging hiatus, I have started working full-time at the farm since the beginning of Jan. Now I am in a much better position to blog about Backsberg happenings.

On the back of a seriously long winter season and much rain, harvest is about two weeks late. After a fairly quiet first two weeks of 2008, véraison is kicking in nicely now. The word ‘véraison’ being the French word to describe the changing of colour of the grapes. This time signals the ripening process in the run up to harvest.

If one considers a block of vineyard, 1st prize, from a quality perspective, is that entire block ripens and is ready to harvest at the same time. It’s no good, if you are aiming for a specific sugar level, and half the block is underripe and the other half is overripe. This would lead to unwanted green and jammy flavours respectively. Much of the preparatory vineyard work is geared to getting uniform ripeness.

To aid this uniform ripeness, we do a véraison thin. That is, we go through the vineyard and we take off all the greenish bunches as well as bunches which show colour variability. The reason to do this now is that soon most of the bunches will have changed colour and it would be impossible to recognise which bunches are behind in terms of ripeness.

This morning we did some véraison thinning on a block of Cabernet Sauvignon. Above is a pic, taken just after 6:30am (the early mornings are something of an adaptation for me after uni life!) demonstrating some unwanted variability next to great bunch of Cab.

SB