Ripening grapes

To be honest with you, I’m a little bit disappointed with our grapes. They are now beginning to ripen on the vine and a large number have sort of frazzled up. Most bunches seem to have at least some dried fruit on them and I can’t imagine that’s great for the wine.

As I think I already wrote in a previous post, we aren’t actually that bothered about making our own wine anyway. We maintained the vineyard this year as a sort of experiment and we wouldn’t want to commit to buying all the equipment needed to make it incase we pulled up the whole lot next year.

I don’t think we will pull up the whole vineyard, it’s so pretty next to the house. But I do think we will cut down on numbers again (we already got rid of half). One idea Antonio had was to get rid of every other row to allow the tractor to pass through. That sounds sensible.

Most of the grapes are the small, dark purple negroamaro variety for making the local red wine but there are a couple of plants that produce another type meant for eating. These large, sweet, blush-coloured and almost seedless grapes are just perfectly ripe right now and we have nearly eaten all of them. It’s a real shame we don’t have more, maybe we should replace some of the wine type.

It’s all a learning experience but I think my initial gut feeling was correct – winemaking is not for me, I’m more of an olive oil girl.