As a wine lover, I read about the uneven ripeness of zin and the notion of ideally harvesting grapes of even ripeness in any circumstance. It made sense.
Now as a winemaker, I can’t imagine perfectly even ripeness as a possibility, much less an ideal.
Zin is notorious for grapes of widely uneven ripeness in a given cluster. But are there any grapes that don’t have some unevenness in any cluster? When berry sampling in vineyards, we’re taught to select from all over different bunches so you’re not just picking the lowest, easiest berry to get at. And don’t pick just the wings or shoulders, if they haven’t been pruned. And don’t just pick from the middle. Pick from all over, because there’s varying degrees of ripeness. Not barely red to perfectly ripe to raisined, but still, tangible differences. What variety doesn’t have this?
And don’t just sample from the lowest cluster in a two cluster per shoot situation. And don’t just take from the last shoot on a cordon, because those are typically more vigorous than middle shoots. And don’t just pick from more sun exposed clusters, in cases there there isn’t extreme leaf pulling, because those clusters vs. the shaded ones will be different. And on and on.
The fact seems to be that any variety shows varying ripeness berry to berry, cluster to cluster, plant to plant, row to row, block to block.
And that’s a good thing in my estimation. Considering techniques like mass selection, where you’re intentionally not planting blocks to a single clone, the implication is that you want a mix of inputs. Even if all that differing plant material does “well” in a given site, so that it’s what you select for replants over time, I can’t imagine those plants are all uniform.
In the end, pretty much all wine is made from grapes of varying ripeness. Perhaps not on the scale of the normal zinfandel, which is extreme. And in examples of berry selection for botrytis, perhaps there’s an unusual amount of uniformity. Mostly though, I embrace the variation of ripeness.