VERAISON pt 3

Some warm weather and things move pretty quickly! This is the same bunch featured only seven days ago.

VERAISON continued.........

Just a few days later......and the weather has been abnormally cold......but once ripening starts, it moves along pretty well. You can clearly see the colour change in these Pinot Noir berries now. They are still quite hard but they will begin to soften now as sugar accumulation takes place.

HAIL DAMAGE

A massive hail storm tore through the Melbourne region in late December. Such events can be catastrophic in vineyards as the hail shreds the leaves and lacerates the berries.
The Squitchy Lane vineyard was luckily not in the epicentre of this storm but there was certainly enough hail to cover the ground and cause some damage to the vines. You can see above what happens to a grape berry when it is hit by a hail stone. These berries will shrivel and drop off the bunch as long as the weather is dry following the damage. There was only a small amount of leaf and berry damage and we assume this was because the hail came straight down and was not driven by strong winds.
We have probably lost 5% of our crop. Other than that, the vines survived very well.

VERAISON

Véraison is the term we use to describe the onset of ripening. The official definition of veraison is "change of color of the grape berries" and you can just make out (if you look very closely at the bunch in the photo above) the first change of colour in a berry as it loses its green appearance and starts to turn red. Veraison marks the transition from berry growth to berry ripening--these Pinot Noir berries won't grow much larger now but they will change colour and begin to lose their acidity while increasing their sugar content. 

It will take a few weeks for the whole bunch to change colour. When that has happened, we reckon that harvest will occur in another forty days or thereabouts. So we should be picking this Pinot Noir in early March.

The vines are growing well although the canopies are not large and we have plucked some leaves from the Pinot Noir vines to allow better air flow to reduce disease pressure. This has increased the bunch exposure--good if the weather remains "normal", not so good if we get a heatwave or even a hailstorm...more on that in the next post....