Tasting pinots and enjoying the weather!

This week has been a spectacular ripening week.  Just about as hot as it can be without being so hot it shuts the vines down.  Perfect!  It will help us continue to catch up to a more 'normal' year, whatever that is!  Our grapes are coming along nicely and the little bit of spotting you can see is a touch of sunburn.   Here are our clusters:

I did taste through the treated pinots last week and was really interested to see what effect the various compounds had.  They all had an effect but not all had a positive effect, which in some ways was a good thing because it helped narrow down my choices to experiment with further.  So after choosing my top five treatments I made up the treatments up again in larger bottles so that I could measure the additions more accurately, let them sit a few days and then made up blends of all the barrels of pinot substituting the treated wines for the barrel that I am experimenting with.  So I have 6 wines to taste: one that is all the barrels blended with no treatments, my control, and then five blends each with one of the treatments substituting for the experimental barrel.  At this point I have not treated the experimental barrel but after this tasting I hope to be able to treat that barrel.  In these blends I am only effecting 7% of the blend so I am curious to see how obvious the treatments are in the final blends.  A few friends/customers are coming up this evening to taste with us and I am looking to see what they think not only of the treatments but of the wines in general.
 

In other news, I went to an Oregon Wine Research Institute conference yesterday in Corvallis at OSU.  It was educational as always as well as a chance to catch up with some friends and students.  I really enjoyed that we had an entomologist and a financier both speak and they brought some new thoughts to the conference including some highly controversial ones!  Usually we only get viticulturalists, food science or fermentation science students and professors, which should be more applicable but not always.  I think sometimes the presenters forget they are talking to farmers and winemakers who are not necessarily scientists or chemists.

On a personal note, my first nephew (on my side of the family) was born this morning!  

Congrats to my brother and his wife, I wish them all the best.