"Life was always a matter of waiting for the right moment to act." ~ Paulo Coelho
9-3-12: A year of hard work, study, research, persevering through pestilence, and equipment failures will soon come to a conclusion at harvest, but until then, we wait. We wait for the grapes to ripen. We busy ourselves with checking our harvest supply lists, checking our procedures and calculations for harvest, checking the irrigation once more, with berry sampling, taking brix, TA and pH measurements, and yet, the grapes will ripen when they are meant to ripen. A component of success in winemaking is learning when, truly, they are ripe and when nothing more can be accomplished by letting them continue to hang. A successful winemaker speaking on the subject commented, "You don't pick the grapes when they look pretty; you pick them when they look ugly." Since our grapes passed by the optimal stage of beauty and are well on their way toward ugly, we're assuming that we're inching closer, and yet, the wine with the most developed brix is the Zin, and it...