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September 09, 2009

Starting your own vineyard: What a year!


This has been a really challenging year for grapes in Northeast Pennsylvania. Wine grapes don't like a lot of rain. Harvest time is supposed to be exciting, but we are having a hard time mustering enthusiasm since so much has gone wrong this year. It all started in May, with the bud-destroying late frost.  It pretty much decimated the Cabernet Franc for the year. We probably don't have enough grapes to make even one bottle. DSC02253

The white Traminette pictured above haven't fared as badly. They actually look pretty professional this year. We are just wondering if they will actually ripen by harvest time since the frost delayed their growth by a good one to two weeks, which is a lifetime for a grape.

How can you tell if a grape is truly ripe? I'm glad you asked, because it gives me a chance to talk about one of the coolest pieces of equipment used in wine making: the refractometer. Basically, the refractometer measures the amount of sugar in your grape juice by detecting the degree to which light is refracted when passing through the juice. Hence the name. Who invents this stuff?

We have a hand-held refractometer that measures something called Brix, which is the measure of how much sugar is in your grape juice. Distilled water has a Brix of 1.00. Ripe Traminette should have a Brix of about 23. And that is precisely what we are worried about this year. Will we achieve Brix 23 before the first frost. Stay tuned!

 

Posted at 07:08 PM |

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kelly

I like your blog. We have a hobby vineyard, the experiences you've relayed seem strickingly similar, even down to the 2 man post hole auger experience. But we are only 3 years into it.
Kelly
British Columbia

Posted by: kelly | November 27, 2009 at 09:27 AM

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  • In 2003, my future husband and I decided to take his wine making hobby to the next level. Instead of buying grapes to make his wine, we planted our own small vineyard of fifty vines. We really knew nothing about raising grapevines, especially vinifera cultivars, but we plunged enthusiastically into the project with an almost vertical learning curve ahead of us. Six years later, we are producing some decent wine, but the intervening years were full of moments of pride and complete frustration. One thing is certain, we could not have done it without insane amounts of work from friends and family.