Watching, Waiting, Ripening

Watching, Waiting, Ripening time. Mid-January and the grapes are just turning from hard little green nuggets to opaque juicy fruit for the white grapes, and colour in the red grapes.

Veraison is the term for this first stage of ripeness. Followed by progressive ripening, that is the sugar increases and acid decreases.

Between now and pick day we wait anxiously and watch the weather, obsessively. The size of crop and quality of grapes is all up to the gods from here. With a little help from the bore water. The Weather Bureau website sits open on our computer screen, it may be true that a watched radar never rains.

Mostly we want rain, city dwellers will wonder if the weather is ever right for farmers as the next stage of ripeness we spend hoping that we don’t get a downpour. When the grapes are going through the ripening period there is this tricky spot where a big dump from the sky will split the berries in half. It happens often enough. Generally we’re all fossicking about with the soil, is it too dry? If the weather is too hot and the vines struggle you can lose berries, bunches and even your whole crop. Too many days over 30 degrees or high winds and the vines shut up shop and go into survival mode.

Wind and heat evaporates what little moisture there is. This is a hard year and the vines are struggling following three years of drought conditions.

Sounds gloomy? Not really, that is farming. You do a lot of predicting and planning in advance setting the vines up for the best chance of survival and good crops then you stop worrying, OK we do moan about the weather but always followed by a shrug and on with the next job, finally it is all about relying on uncontrollable and often unpredictable weather.

We have noted colour in the Shiraz in the Bovate Vineyard, just the odd berry only a few days ago yet today there are whole bunches turning a bright pink to deep rosey red. Our ranging chooks are already filling their bellies by jumping up to pluck grapes from the canopy.

Picking grapes for wine is still weeks away. Our estimate is one month to the white pick and the reds around six weeks. Red grapes in McLaren Vale aren’t ‘flavour ripe’ until they reach quite high sugar levels. With white grapes we’re going for a fresher higher acid style of wine so naturally we pick earlier.

But picking will start here at Producers very soon - for Agraz and Verjuice - we are tasting the Riesling daily, checking when it is at the right stage of acid to fruit flavour balance for making our Verjuice. We have made verjuice from a variety of grapes but Riesling remains my favourite for adding to salads and lifting flavour in sauces and dressings. I can hardly wait and it takes great patience to leave them just-one-more-day. The window for making perfect verjuice is only a matter of days so the right time for picking is crucial.