#tarahills

 A view down the barrel of the meter today with juice from a few of my grapes.

Thats right, I just got a BRIX meter, or that is to say a Portable Analog Refractometer. After calibration, (and unfortunately getting a unit which doesn't read perfectly level) my first reading showed up as what I will call a 26% BRIX reading, which is great, as in my 2nd season my grapes are ready to be made into wine!

Looks actually like this batch would yield me a wine that would be in the neighborhood of 15.9% alcohol by volume, if I did my calculations right.

Success! Now next season -2017-  looks like it will yield the first vintage from McMorrow Cellars. I’m aiming to grow enough fruit to get me in the neighborhood of 50-60 bottles. SO I will start reaching out to local partners to find a preferred method to get this wine made. Im still determining whether I want to try to take on making it at home, or using a local facility to help me de-stem, crush, ferment, store and bottle this stuff. It’s probably more than I can handle on my own, as the equipment for fermenting is a bit pricey, as well as my lack of a temperature controlled space that I can store the juice. My garage would be the only option, but it is not insulated, and temperatures in there fluctuate wildly, especially during the summer. It can easily go from 100º to 50º and back over a 24 hour period, not ideal for the aging process. 

I’m excited to see so many bunches, and see them all developing a beautiful rich purple color. I ate one on Sunday- chewed it and spit it out at least. Definitely a grape- bitter- but with a hint of sweetness. Thick skin, flimsy seed.

Good things.

Big things. This 2nd year is the first for fruit and now that its Summer we’re seeing signs of Veraison - representing the transition from berry growth to berry ripening. God things!

SO the vineyard is doing great! A ton of growth, pretty evenly across the whole yard, row 1 (North Row) is stronger, by about 25%, I have to chalk this up to its full sun and slightly better soil. But we have grapes on all vines!

You can see the evolution here- in their 2nd year fruit us present, and I’m super happy- as the book has said that it might take 3 years.  Either way you can see that from late April- to May we have the first fruit start to develop- tiny bunches of berries . After a month they’ve grown to hearty bunches- and as of just the other day they’re getting ell rounded, heavy and firm- Ill keep updating this as they grow!

So early March I started to see bud-break on all the vines. An amazing site as vines of McMorrow Cellars enter their 2nd year.

This is one of my 3 potted back-yard vines, in 2 weeks they really took off!

March 16th was the magic day, everything started exploding on or directly after that day. 

Now in early April you can see everything has really taken off, huge spurs and new stems all over!

Nice bark all over all stocks.

SO I keep track of all weather data for our area, with the hopes that it will give me clues for reference on the final terroir of our wine. I had been tracking a personal weather station about a mile from our vineyard for the first year, via the Weather Underground. You can track our station- KCASANPA7 here: https://www.wunderground.com/personal-weather-station/dashboard?ID=KCASANPA7