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| Lony & Pablo Measuring Grape Samples for Ripeness |
Our long-awaited harvest interns arrived this week! Lony and Pablo are a young couple from Chile pursuing careers-slash-lives in Winemaking and Agrobusiness at the Universidad de la Frontera in Temuco. Funny how as an American, I automatically assume one’s ‘career’ and one’s ‘life’ are so inseparably connected. I look forward to getting to know Lony and Pablo and to trying to get a sense of how they view the importance of their ‘careers’ in their lives, what they hope to do with winemaking, and what winemaking means to them. Winemaking is such a rich field in which to pursue one’s ‘Career’ because it attracts people from so many different countries and cultures and experiences for some of the same, few, basic reasons.
Anyway, Lony and Pablo have migrated up to the Northern Hemisphere to work their second harvest of the year. Another reason pursuing winemaking is so awesome is that it allows you (pretty much requires you) to move back and forth between hemispheres while learning the craft so as to maximize your number of harvest experiences in one year. I’ll have to ask L & P how the 2011 harvest was in Chile this year, and how they feel about Californian wine! So much fun to talk with Wine People (yes, we are a People) of different countries about what they think of Californian wine, how our style differs from their winemaking traditions, and how the two may or may not be converging as with everything else in this globalizing world...
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| Squished Grape Samples from EVERY Vineyard Block We Have! |
So today, they weighed grapes, noted the color of the ‘pips’ for ripeness (pips = the seeds in the grape berry, and they go from light green to brown as the berries ripen), and measured the sugar content, total acidity, and pH of the berries to see how close they are for the pickin’. Not terribly close apparently. But we’re hoping to bring in our first bit of Chardonnay tomorrow, and our first reds next week! Stay tuned!
britt.
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