September 3 - September 9, 2017

	Sunday September 3, 2017 We were hoping for a lot of cooling weather today but at 3:00 Pm we are still up to 110 now. Tomorrow is forecast to be in the 90's but we will see. The Zinfandel we have harvested is about ready for pressing tomorrow. The acid in the grapes this year are much higher than last year. We still have most of our fruit to come in so this heat may bring down the acids. The minimum lows the last two nights have been 62, 71 and 65. This time of year we usually see low 50's. The vines and grapes have to rest at night, thus the low temperatures compared to most other places in the world. When temperatures do not cool off by midnight grape acids fall off very fast and quality wine can not be made. Sure we could add acid but that just does not produce a balanced wine. Thursday September 7, 2017 I must be old!! I am exhausted. We harvested grapes for home winemakers Tuesday and it was not a good experience. Two guys came in to buy Zinfandel from me and Sangiovese from my neighbor. One of the many problems is that they wanted exactly 600 pounds of each. We picked 1800 pounds of Zinfandel in two bins so I had to organize the removal of gapes from one bin into an empty bin. That took about an hour or so. Then the Sangiovese bin had to have 176 pounds removed to achieve 600 pounds. Then they wanted to have the fruit stemmed into 3 or 4 garbage cans to ferment. That involved me, Josh and Jose who were working at pressing our wine. They were here about 2 hours taking up our precious time. Then they complained about the price which amounted to $3 a bottle to me. As I have said before it makes no sense to sell grapes if I can sell wine for more than $5 a bottle. I won't be selling to home winemakers again, it was Susie's idea and she did not help............ I am also stressed out because I finally went to San Francisco to pick up my new Tesla Model S 100D. It is every thing I hoped for. But the delivery was delayed for three hours with a minor problem? So Susie and I also stopped in Millbrae to visit my Mother. She has a fracture on her left arm so she did not look too well. Her spirits are good though. After the short visit we heeded back to Tesla to pick up the 100D which hopefully is OK now. At 1:30 Pm we headed home and we were delayed. There was a fire and Highway 101 was converted to one lane. The delay was over one hour. I got home at 4:30 and I was surprised I didn't even want to eat or consume some wine. I will try again tonight!! Saturday September 9, 2017 Yesterday was another stressful day. I did not want to eat much again and it is probably because my sore is still not getting better. Dr. Dri, Brad's wife, told me to soak it and I felt much better and I even went out with Susie and Pat for some wine and a small dinner. The weather has cooled down so we did some more sugar tests and nothing is ready except the second crop for Dave's Cuvee. Today we already brought in one bin and the sugar is ideal at 25 to 26 %. We are picking one more today and maybe three on Monday. There may be some rain on Tuesday so we probably won't pick any of the other varieties until late next week or even into the following week. In the mean time we should be able to harvest all the second crop from the old vines. Dave's Cuvee for 2017 will be great again!!...............
	Dave For any comments or questions I encourage any of you to e-mail.....david@coffaro.com
	Home | Read | Diary | Tell Us What You Think of Our Diary | Last Week | Next Week

o





++