White grape harvest

We completed our white grape harvest on Tuesday 17 September. The harvest was particularly long, taking two weeks to finish, but was undertaken in excellent weather conditions. The resulting grapes are beautiful and perfectly healthy, and the yield is slightly larger than that of the last five years.

The perfect state of health of the berries and the superb weather conditions we had throughout the harvest were a good opportunity to conduct a grape maturity assessment. We thus waited five days after the end of the white grape harvest to pick the grapes in our last half-plot. The idea was to question our established beliefs regarding the ideal maturity for our grapes as well as the best time to harvest them. Generally speaking, acidity and freshness are our two top criteria in deciding when to pick our white grapes. Would we lose a significant amount of acidity by harvesting five days later? Conversely, would we gain in concentration and richness? What kind of wine would we obtain with these few extra days of maturity?

In the days to come, we will have the preliminary answers to these questions.