At this point it seems almost like a digression to return to green harvesting, but here are my two cents.
Grape growers decide how and where to plant, how to train the vines and when to pick. They spray with copper sulfate. So I’m not losing any sleep over green harvests. After all, irrigating in moderation isn’t necessarily a bad thing and may be better than the alternatives depending on the location and the vintage. Perhaps green harvesting can be taken to extremes; I don’t know, honestly.
Berry – I’m with you in spirit. Some wines taste like they’re all about winemaking wizardry and are covered up in oak or extract, or muddied by reverse osmosis and malolactic in barrel. Others have a kind of transparency about them and seem simply to channel the fruit.
But I don’t think the line between good and bad wine necessarily corresponds to the number of “interventions.” Using a bit of press wine was a standard technique in Bordeaux, for instance, and yet there were wonderful wines. Was that “manipulation”? Is trimming the canopy to expose the grapes to a bit more sun, or to ensure that they dry out during a damp period? I guess so. Do these things deprive the wines of some desirable natural quality? I don’t think so.
I’m genuinely interesting in the original topic. I asked specifically about green harvesting, but really anything related to pruning, planting density, optimizing vegetative growth falls along those lines. I guess if vines are ‘naturally’ balanced, then these techniques are irrelevant. But in vineyards that require some work, it appears these might be more recent implementations. But maybe not–perhaps there are historical norms in certain regions that only more recently spread elsewhere.
Sure, pH changes the most. Why does that matter as far as what is more important? pH is the strength of the acidity while TA is, roughly, the amount of the acidity. I pay more attention to pH because I believe it is primarily what you notice (acid-wise) when you taste wine – the strength of the acid. I also know that higher pH wines are more succeptiable to bacterial growth, etc. and require higher levels of SO2 to be properl protected.
As far as tomatoes go…the quality of the fruit in tomatoes is reflected purely in the way the fruit tastes. The best tasting grapes do not always make the best tasting wine.
Sorry to have been one of thosse who has led this thread astray. In my experience, we would normally go thru and do a green harvest in our vineyards…if not to reduce yields, at least a bit to even out the ripening.
We do often green harvest to reduce yields but it is not an every year, every place situation.
Not to go too far off topic, but why do you, Adam, think that pH affects tartness of taste more than TA?
From what I recall from a class at Davis, it is TA that affects the appearance of tartness more and pH that affects the stability of the wine more. It is entirely possible that my recollection is wrong or that the info they had at the time has been replaced by more recent data.
I pay a lot of attention to both for the reason above, but those reasons could be wrong.
One thing Ive been told by a few burgundy winemakers is that one thing they like about old vines is that yeilds are naturally small and the juice concentrated without green harvesting.
Thank you. It certainly isn’t ‘sophistry’ to point out the plain fact that the craft of winemaking consists of a series of manipulations. Snickering ‘oh you think picking the grapes is a manipulation’ and ignoring all the choices involved in everything from training the vines to managing the maceration to choosing the aging vessel and a hundred more besides is closer to sophistry. Looking for an unmanipulated wine is like looking for someone to cook you an unmanipulated dinner.
What’s actually going on is that people believe that there are good manipulations and bad manipulations, but instead of just saying this plainly we get quasi-mystical claims about ‘natural’ wines. I think almost all wine drinkers would agree that there are good and bad manipulations and you could have a good conversation about the details of which fit in which category and why, but that’s too simple I suppose. These kind of threads do usually produce some good conversation along those lines (like Greg Tatar’s excellent discussion of green harvesting above), but not before a big pissing match about terminology first.
Doesn’t come from any scientific study on my part. I simply find that, in red wines, the pH level plays more of a part in how the wine tastes – particularly in two areas, how round (or not round) it is in the mid-palate, and also how it plays together with the tannins (low pH and not-completely-ripe tannnins being a rough combination to overcome and more prevelant in later ripening grapes in 2009 and 2010). With white wines, oddly enough, I pay attention more to TA.
Missed the point entirely Marcus. No one snickers that ‘you think picking grapes is manipulation.’ On the contrary, as Lewis pointed out some Captain Obvious always snarks that “well picking grapes is manipulation.” It’s an pathetic attempt to score a point in an argument, not to further discussion. Go back and read the thread and you’ll see how this particular, banal, line of argumentation started. It’s always started by someone making the incredibly obvious point that merely making wines is intervening in what the grapes would otherwise do. Of course, that’s not the topic… the topic is clearly manipulation in the viticultural and winemaking process. But Cris and others seem to think they’re being profound so…
Rick, don’t even bother… this “argument” has already been refuted dozens of times and it doesn’t seem to stop people from chiming in with it on every single thread about winemaking practices as if it’s a super-clever “gotcha” argument that nobody’s ever seen before. Best to let the offenders pat themselves on the back while the actual discussion proceeds without them.
Well I was the first “captain obvious” in this thread stating all viticulture is manipulation, I was not trying to score a point. I honestly beleive it is important to keep that context in mind when having these discussions. Its wasted energy to argue whether a specific action is manipulation or not. I think the time is better spent exploring how different viticultural and vinification decisions effect the finished instead of turning it into a moral issue. For this to be a fruitful excersize we need the participation of winemakers who can offer real life experiences and I get the feeling many don’t wish to participate because of the moral context of the debate.
You guys may disagree with my point of view but it certainly wasn’t meant to score a cheap point.
You’ve been here long enough to know it’s an incredibly banal point. At least I hope you do. No one, NO ONE has ever started the conversation from the other side, that picking grapes isn’t manipulation. It’s a given that humans making wine are intervening in what the grapes would otherwise do (though I find it interesting to claim that it’s ‘not natural’ since, well, we’re part of nature). Discussions about manipulation, the intelligent ones at least, don’t start out stating incredibly obvious points but try to address issues about the kinds of manipulation, the degree of such, whether they’re needed or the imposition of a style, etc. Much of the nervousness about more recent techniques are simply because we don’t have a decades long history with them.
But then I knew the discussion would go precisely as it has. It always does. I have no idea why people keep asking the same questions. The amusing thing is that every single person completely missed the point of why Altare’s father was upset which had nothing to do with manipulation as we mean it here.
I should have been more clear but I hate to write.
I think the best way to limit yields is dense planting where vines itself, due to competition for nutrients, will reduce yields. Wines that are planted far apart have to have higher yields in order to be comercially viable. So i guess yields per plant is the most viable.
Yields per hectar is one of the biggest BS stories that was ever fed to the press. Low yields do not guarantee quality and sometimes quite the contrary, some of the worst vintages in burgundy have been low yielding due to rot, mildew unripe grapes that had to be discarded and so on, while some of the highest yielding vintages like 1996, 1999, 2005, 2009… have been considered to be top. Burgundy’s vineyards are densely planted and have around 10,000 vines per hectare and if in full health, meaning no dead or sterile wines, producing anywhere from 20h/h to 45h/h or so dependent on the vintage. If a third of your plant is sterile and another third sick or unhealthy your yields just went from 20h/h to 45h/h to 6.6h/h to 15h/h and if you want to have normal yields you have to overcrop the remaining wines. Now, no winemaker will tell you that the yields are low due to 2/3 of vines being sterile or unproductive but will give you a story of a low yields and commitment to quality at the expense of yields. Apples per apples, having a 10,000 healthy vines that produce 45h/h is better than having 5,000 producing 45h/h. Having 3,333 vines producing 15h/h is no better than 10,000 vines producing 45h/h.
Green harvesting is another gimmick that I have consider it crazy for most of the times. Why would you have a Vine spending all the energy nurturing the clusters just to cut them off when they’re about to change color. Why not limit the buds during the pruning? Green harvest was always a good story for a winemakers to feed to press in order to look like a producer who’s all about quality at the expense of quantity and it was easy for them to understand. Only times I can see it being useful is when you’re late in the season and there’s a risk that crop won’t ripen due to a bad weather, thinning the crop may help.
This is something I’ve wondered about for some time, though it is off-topic. I’ve always thought pH was more structural, while TA was often what we tasted directly. Certainly acid species relates to flavor profile as malic acid in apples and citric in oranges plays a part in the flavor profile.
But the mouth-watering quality of wine–something I like–is a response to buffer the acidity. That would seem to be more likely a response to the pH, the overall strength of the acidity.
On the yield question specifically, there are a lot of different yields to measure and contemplate. As mentioned above, per vine versus per acre. Before green harvest versus after. But what about selective harvesting, where for example, unripe bunches or rotten bunches are not brought in. What about sorting table reductions. Lots of different yield data, and a lot of different definitions. By the standard of the broad definition of “manipulation”, all meet the definition. But merely that conclusion does not tell us anything that we want to know, IMO.
BTW, my experience in buying young Burgundy is, years that require a lot of sorting are years with greater risk of future disappointmnets. And I guess there was a lot of sorting in Burgundy in 2010??
Oh Rick, I don’t think every person missed the point of why Altare’s father was upset. I’d hazard a guess that most people got it. If it’s acknowledgement that you need, we lay prostrate before you and thank you for enlightening us small minded peons.
I was going to say just that. Most of the participants in this thread focused on the global picture (and the questions in the OP) rather than on the anecdote, which lead to a really great discussion so far.
Now I’m going back to Leo’s point:
Apples per apples, having a 10,000 healthy vines that produce 45h/h is better than having 5,000 producing 45h/h. Having 3,333 vines producing 15h/h is no different than 10,000 vines producing 45h/h.
Leo, can you please give more details as to why it is better (1st sentence) or “no different” (2nd sentence). Obviously having the same yield per ha with fewer vines means each vine has to carry more fruit… if the density is lower, aren’t the roots going to be bigger?
I think what you guys are understandably annoyed with the “all techniques are manipulation so it is hypocritical to complain about or not like certain manipulations”. I agree that is a tiresome and ineffective argument.
But the the question that started this thread was higher level than that: “Lowering yields: manipulation or not?”. Of course the OP text really was talking more about wether it was a tradional technique but I found it hard not to disagree with the premise inherent in his subject line and am guilty of starting the thread drift. I apologize for that. The therad drift though does betray that there is still alot of semnatic confusion that gets in the way of intellegent discussions about techniques and we spend alot of time talking about meta topics
An acute observation.