A Wellington Wine Blog (of sorts) Part 3

What I Would be Doing This Month (and last month) if I Hadn’t Retired

July
Please accept my apology for not posting a timely description of July activities, but, as you can see, nothing new or really interesting happens in July. Winery activity in July is very similar to June: bottling, blending, racking, crush planning.
Vineyard work also slows. Cover crops have dried up, so there’s no more mowing. Leaf thinning, suckering and shoot training should be complete, so potential cluster thinning is the main remaining handwork. Veraison typically starts in late July, and sulfur dusting or other forms of mildew prevention are no longer necessary.

August
August in the winery can be frenzied or laid back, depending on when grapes are ready. We have started harvest as early as August 22nd and as late as September 30th. Our last bottling was usually in the second half of August, and twice we needed to bottle after crush started – not fun. Normally we would have bottling completed, old barrels sold and removed, floors cleaned and the remaining barreled wine prepared to be ignored for three months. Final preparations for crush should be complete – yeast and other supplies ordered or on hand, machinery cleaned and tested, seasonal labor arranged.
Veraison (pronounced “verasion” by almost all U.S. wine industry members) heralds the final stage of ripening and influences vineyard practice in a couple of ways. Grape berry development occurs in three fairly distinct phases. After fruit set (pollination) the berries grow rapidly for a few weeks (phase 1), then visually appear to do nothing for a few weeks (phase 2), and finally, at veraison, start to enlarge again while changing color and rapidly accumulating sugar (phase 3).
Water management during this time is important for grape quality. We need active growth to produce enough leaves in order to ripen the crop, but we want the vines to halt new growth just before veraison and put all their energy into ripening. In practice this can mean severely restricting water in the weeks before veraison, then increasing irrigation again so that the vines can maintain enough healthy leaves to ripen the crop.
The change of color at veraison coincides with the advent of rapid sugar accumulation in the grapes. Grape berries are resistant to infection by powdery mildew once sugar levels reach around eight percent, so sulfur dust or other anti-fungals are no longer needed.
The midpoint of veraison is the easiest time to assess how evenly the crop is ripening. Individual vines that lag significantly now should be thinned aggressively to allow ripening to catch up with the rest of the vines. Now that the clusters are full sized we can make a more accurate crop estimate, and do a final (or maybe first and only) green harvest (thinning).
Vineyard work from this point on involves little more than irrigation. My vineyard manager usually went to Mexico for a couple of weeks in August, and it was the only non-winter month when I could be away for more than a week.

Next month: Crush!