Quartz Block Zinfandel – August 28th

So this is the 3rd part of the Quartz block series and if you’re still following along now or just now picking it up we’re taking everyone on an interactive tour of the winemaking process.  To this point we’ve seen the development of the Quartz Block, our Zinfandel vineyard in Amador County at Story Winery.  This next segment gives a quick look at the continual development of our fruit; later this week I’ll post a video from September the 7th.  The date today as I type this up is September the 14th and if you were worried while reading this I have not harvested yet, but yes we are close as you’ll see from the next update.

In this video you can see that we have hit what we call 100% veraison, i.e. all of the fruit has colored up to the varietal color of a finished red grape (white grapes also go through a type of veraison but the physical change is obviously a little more subtle).  It’s at this point we will start to see the accumulation of sugar and will start to monitor the flavor development of our vineyard.  On this day we were literally in the vineyard pruning out any extra vegetative growth, as well as any fruit that was of lesser quality and also any of the secondary clusters.  So what we’re finally left with is a vineyard that is clean of all negative fruit, a canopy that is open to where light can infilitrate and ripen our fruit but not so open that our fruit is too exposed and at risk of sunburn (yes fruit skin just like your skin can become sunburned), and last we have removed any superfluous shoot growth coming from the base of the vine.