Aglianico veraison
As I said in the previous post, this has been a challenging year – both in my home life and in the vineyard. The season started off promising enough, but then came cool, cloudy, rainy days that delayed fruit set and resulted in some millerandage in my Aglianico.
Now, in addition to uneven berry and cluster size, I am seeing uneven ripening along with some weird discoloration of the unripened berries.
This is probably not an uncommon occurrence in California and I can’t help but wonder how often those vintage reports of “small but high quality berries” are simply code-speak for shot berries.
The following two images illustrate the range of uneven veraison:
Aglianico veraison
Aglianico veraison
The image, below, illustrates an extreme of the range of millerandage I am seeing:
Uneven berry size and uneven veraison.
The Montepuciano is pushing along nicely, with the exception of two vines which I will probably cut back, with the hopes that they will grow better next year:
A single Montepulciano vine being trained to its first bifurcation.
A row of Montepulciano vines.
