The Wine Lover: Many factors influence when to pick wine grapes

When to pick your grapes is an extremely important question and with harvest season right around the corner it’s something that wine makers will soon be asking. It’s a decision they must make every harvest because it will in part determine what kind of wine they are trying to craft. They must take into consideration Brix, weather, tannins, ripeness and much more.
A common question out in the vineyard in late September is “What’s the Brix?” The Brix scale is a measurement of sugar in the grape and helps determine when to harvest. The Brix measurement is so important because, at the end of the day, it will determine the alcohol percentage you must put on your label. The sugar in the grapes will be converted to alcohol during the fermentation process. During harvest, grapes are typically picked when the Brix measurement is somewhere in the low to mid 20s. The alcohol comes out to a little more than half of the Brix number. Thus, if the Brix in your cabernet sauvignon grapes is 24, you could make a rough estimate that your wine would come out to about 13 percent alcohol.
Weather impacts decisions for the simple reason that it can destroy a harvest very quickly. Sometimes, if a particularly violent storm comes early, a crop will have to be harvested before the most ideal time. On the other hand, if it is exceptionally hot in September, the grapes may ripen with sugar faster than is anticipated or desired. Sometimes, the Brix may be right but the tannins won’t be ready.
Have you ever eaten a wine grape? At harvest time, they are wonderfully sweet. They taste delicious, but there are seeds in the middle, and these help to determine tannin ripeness. If the seeds are green and bitter, they are not ready. If they are brown and the Brix is right, then you are looking at a good harvest.
This year, we are looking at a late harvest, because summer took a long time to kick in and the days have been fairly cool. Look for October to yet again be the ideal harvest month. It seems the season is getting later steadily every year.
Cheers, my wine-loving friends.
Austin Twohig is a certified sommelier and partner in The Santa Cruz Experience, which conducts winery tours in the Santa Cruz Mountains. Contact him at

au****@th********************.com











.