When I Caught A Glimpse of Rita

Let me take a moment to introduce Rita.  
Rita is a project T and I began when we started feeling badly about all the premium napa valley juice we were dumping down the drain at the end of the days when we sampled vineyards.  

To help the winemaker know when to harvest the grapes, we lab people go out to collect random clusters to represent the vineyard.  We bring the clusters back to the winery, count them, weigh them and then squeeze the berries for the juice.

We then test the juice for the sugar and acid content (most important), as well as some nitrogen or potassium levels which help us determine what nutrients we will want to add to help the fermentation.  

Over the sampling season (August - October) we want the sugar in the fruit to rise and the acid to drop, however, if we wait too long, the sugar will rise too much and the acid will drop too far and we will have poor conditions for making wine.  So our job is to find a sweet spot in the middle where we have enough sugar for the yeast to ferment, and enough acid left to keep the wine from becoming flabby.  Along with chemistry numbers and taste, the winemaker decides when the grapes have hit that spot and we harvest them.
 

To get there, we sample each vineyard several times to track the changes, and that leaves us with plenty of juice at the end of the day.
Instead of dumping them, we collected all the juice samples we run for analysis into a glass carboy.  We added some yeast and now we are going to let her ferment and eventually dare each other to drink the results.  

Here is the above process:


 

Rita is a mix between white grapes and red grapes, which really, no one advises.  
We thought she would be a rose, but unfortunately she looks more like watery tomato juice.

Even though she comes from scraps and has been largely neglected by us with all the current harvest turmoil, we continue to have high hopes for her.


You go girl.


-L