GREEN HARVESTING

The quality of a wine is directly dependent upon the quality of its raw material: the grapes. It’s up to the farmer to do his best to produce a crop of good grapes. Usually, wineries pay a certain price per ton for grapes. If you are the farmer, your goal would then be to produce the best possible grapes and as many of them per acre as possible. The winemaker, however, has a different point of view. It turns out that if too many grapes are grown per acre, the wine made from those grapes is diluted. The vines extract various nutrients from the soil, and the more grapes there are, the wider the nutrients are dispersed. By cutting off some of the grapes shortly after they are formed, the vines will then direct all of the nutrients into fewer grapes. There won’t be as many grapes for the farmer to sell, but they will be better, more concentrated grapes, resulting in better, more concentrated wine. If you sell your grapes by the ton, you won’t be inclined to cut off part of your crop, but this is exactly what quality-conscious growers are doing (the wineries offer them more money per ton to motivate them to do this). Since the grapes are still green when this cutting occurs, this process is called “green harvesting.” Hopefully this explanation has shown why it is a valuable technique in the making of good, full-bodied wines. It also explains one reason why such wines cost more.