OATLEY VINEBLOG
OATLEY VINEBLOG
Veraison has started on the Madeleine Angevine. That’s when the fruit suddenly swells and goes soft and translucent. And so I’ve started monitoring the sugars to get a fix on harvest. Ripening seems to be progressing within a day or two of 2013, and we expect to pick the Madeleine grapes on 25th September. The time taken from veraison to harvest doesn’t vary much, so we can be pretty sure. Could be a week later, but unlikely to be earlier. Augurs well. Our 2013 Madeleine (“Jane’s”) was a very-sauvignon-blanc-y favourite with customers, so here’s hoping for a repeat!
For the next few weeks I’ll be trudging up selected rows every three days, sampling the juice with a refractometer. It’s a pen-sized optical instrument that tells you the sugar level in a grape just from a single drop. It works because the refractive index of the grape juice is directly proportional to the sugar content. You have to take a lot of readings, spread over the vineyard, to get an accurate estimate, and I take around 90 in the Madeleine and 100 in the slightly larger area of Kernling. I record each reading on a schematic Excel map because the variation over the slope is useful information. Later on we collect the grapes, taste the combined juice and titrate the acid to help assess ripeness - sugar is not everything - but for now the sugar maps are enough to get a pretty clear idea of how things are going over the vineyard. We’ve got ten years of data for the same vines in the same sampling pattern, and harvest records and tasting notes/awards for the resulting wines, which helps us to decide what works best for picking dates.
The fruit-set at the top of the Madeleine isn’t perfect - that’s where the flowers came out first when it was still cold. There are lots of small and rather sparse berries there, which are probably unfertilised, meaning they’ll ripen quickly into thin-skinned little sugar bombs and might give us wasp problems. But further down the slope it’s fine so we should have a fair-sized crop. Ripeness is more even down the slope than last year. All to do with when July’s hot weather was. Last year it went cold-hot-cold during flowering so the fruit set took ages to finish, and this year it was cold-hot-warm and setting was swift.
Busier than ever with sales, which has kept us from getting quite so Lympic-hooked as last time. A bit, but not very, behind with the August vine-trimming, but it’s been fairly dry so the vines and the under-vine grasses aren’t like the sodden jungle that greeted us when we emerged blinking into the light at the end of London 2012.
Recently back from a quick trip to Italy - the younger Awtlies bought us tickets to the opera in the Roman arena at Verona. We flew from Bristol via a nostalgic overnight stay in Venice and had a LOVELY few days in beautiful Verona - our first visit. A thunderstorm meant we sadly didn’t get quite to the end of Il Trovatore but enough to know that my namesake, Leonora, was doomed. Some beautiful food and wines. Highlight for me was an astonishing plate of gnocchi with black truffle with a perfectly-matched unfiltered, small-producer Garganega sitting in the square outside the (highly recommended) “Antica Torretta”.
And now we have the pleasure of our youngest, Fred, and partner Nora, on a fleeting visit from Hong Kong as they plan their wedding in Somerset for next year. They put on a great English fizz tasting. Delighted to find that West Country ones shone! (No, can’t tell. It’s a surprise!)
A couple of shows coming up. Oxford winefest in the historic Oxford Union, on the evening of Fri 9th and all day and evening of Sat 10th September, and the next weekend the Weston-super-food-fest at the Weston Tropicana, scene of Banksy’s internationally acclaimed “Dismaland” last year. Details on our Events page>>
Cripes! La vendemmia will be here before we know it!
PS, in case you missed it, here’s our summer newsletter>>. You can sign up fo these here>>. we only do a couple a year.
The Madeleine Angevine grapes have started veraison. A key milestone in the vineyard year because that’s when you can predict the harvest date.
So now it’s sugar sampling every few days to track the ripening.
An OK set this year in the Madeleine but now they’re swelling we can see it’s not perfect. Busy now with August trimming.
Excellent brief trip to Venice and Verona - and now there’s wedding planning going on.
Veraison
Sunday, 21 August 2016
Lovely Verona
Less than perfect fruit set in places