I picked/crushed everything yesterday afternoon, beautiful day. Got about 9 gallons of must, 4 gallons off of one plant. I'm going to do a single plant batch with the grapes from the one plant. Brix varied, the 4 gallon batch was about 19.5, a 2 gallon pale at about 17.5 and 3 gallons at 18.5.
Overall, the ripeness seemed more dependent on sun exposure than crop load. My profile pic shows 7 of my vines. The right side is east and ends at the garage. The farthest east plant is trained over the garage door and gets solid afternoon sun and is more spread out than the others. The east plant was the ripest. The west plant was next ripest with each succeeding plant less ripe as you go east. The plants in the middle are shaded by the garage in the morning and by the adjacent vines in the afternoon. One of the vines in the middle had noticeably less fruit but the ripeness seemed the same. Next year I'm going to put a little effort into training (this year I just left them mostly on their own) to get a better separation of the fruit from the leaves and have a more traditional "fruiting zone". Most of the vines in the profile pic had grapes distributed throughout the canopy. The ones that were more exposed seemed better.
It looks like this cold event will be a record breaker. Previous record low was 27 and they are forecasting 25. I've lived here for 25 years and it will be the coldest October day I can remember.
Overall, the ripeness seemed more dependent on sun exposure than crop load. My profile pic shows 7 of my vines. The right side is east and ends at the garage. The farthest east plant is trained over the garage door and gets solid afternoon sun and is more spread out than the others. The east plant was the ripest. The west plant was next ripest with each succeeding plant less ripe as you go east. The plants in the middle are shaded by the garage in the morning and by the adjacent vines in the afternoon. One of the vines in the middle had noticeably less fruit but the ripeness seemed the same. Next year I'm going to put a little effort into training (this year I just left them mostly on their own) to get a better separation of the fruit from the leaves and have a more traditional "fruiting zone". Most of the vines in the profile pic had grapes distributed throughout the canopy. The ones that were more exposed seemed better.
It looks like this cold event will be a record breaker. Previous record low was 27 and they are forecasting 25. I've lived here for 25 years and it will be the coldest October day I can remember.
