Veraison

Veraison is the moment a grapevine stops building and starts ripening. Up to now every berry has been a hard green pellet, sour enough to make your eyes water, and the vine has been spending its energy on canopy. Then, over about a week, the berries soften, the opaque green goes translucent and starts to gild, sugar begins moving into the fruit and acid begins to fall. On a white grape it is subtle. You feel it with your fingers before you see it. In our test plot it started the last week of July, right on schedule.

The numbers

I pulled a few clusters on July 26 and tested them.

• Brix: about 11
• Specific gravity: around 1.045
• pH: 2.85 to 2.98

For a still table wine those numbers would be alarming. For a sparkling base they are right where I want them at the start of veraison. The target I set last year was 18 Brix and a pH near 3.2, and last season finished at 19.3 and 3.6, riper than I wanted because the fruit hung into September. This year the plan is to pick earlier, around the middle of August, with roughly two weeks of hang time from here as long as the rain holds out. Sparkling wine is made on acid, and acid is the thing Missouri takes away from you fastest once the heat settles in.

What July was like

We have already had 32 inches of rain this year. July ran 65 to 70 percent humidity with highs in the 90s and lows that rarely dropped below 80, and the last two days before I tested were 95 to 100 degrees at 80 percent humidity. That is the Missouri a vine has to survive. Now we are finally into the droughty stretch of late summer, and this is where the magic happens, if it happens. Milder temperatures and dry air let the fruit develop at an excellent pace without the disease pressure that comes with every rain. My one worry is the strong El Niño we are supposed to be in this year and the late summer and early fall rain it sometimes brings. If that shows up early, the harvest date moves up with it.

Every year, the stretch from the middle of June through the end of July is the hard part. The only way I have found to get through it is a consistent spray program, alternating fungicide groups so nothing builds resistance, with kaolin clay in the rotation, plus leaf and shoot thinning every couple of weeks to keep each canopy open and remind the vine we are here for the fruit, not the vegetation. By mid-July the weekly spraying and the thinning taper off, and veraison itself shuts down almost every push of suckers and stray shoots. The vine finally agrees with you about what matters.

The pest that would not take the hint was Japanese beetles. Two weeks of them, and spinosad was not nearly as effective as I wanted it to be.

Nets

Anyone who read last year's post knows how the raccoons ended it, 80 percent of the north end stripped overnight at 13 or 14 Brix. So the nets went up on July 26, the same day I tested, and not a day later.

The new variable this year is a fox den under the shed, about twenty feet west of the vines on the other side of the garden. All summer the foxes have been occupied with the lettuce that was poking through the fence on the south end. We have harvested the lettuce now, and I fully expect them to turn their very capable attention to the ripening fruit and start working on how to get through the netting. We will see who is smarter.

Shaping up to be another solid year. Harvest in about two weeks if the weather cooperates.

More to come.