Veraison bandwagon

Well, everyone is talking about it, so I figured I may as well join in.  Here are some pictures of the Mourvédre (1st picture) and the Grenache (next two) starting to turn red, a process which is called "veraison".   When this happens we know we are in the home stretch, looking towards an early September harvest.  Luckily, the heat wave has ended and we are back to warm days and cool nights which will help tremendously.  If the temps had stayed in the upper 90s until harvest, I'm not sure what we would have been picking, raisins most likely.

We're looking at a pretty small crop this year, but hopefully  
that will mean the quality will be comparable to last year.  The biggest problem we could encounter is that the ripening actually gets "stuck"  which can happen in drought years. The grapes start to turn color, and then, due to the harsh weather conditions, they get stuck and remain half ripe dark berries and half pale purple unripe berries.  We already saw some of that last year, I'm really hoping we'll avoid it this year.... we'll see.