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(lone with more objective criteria.
“It’s very scientific. It’s not just smell and tasting anymore,” said Corrine Salahi.
Analyzed Daily
As harvest time approaches, the grapes are analyzed daily for sugar and acidity. The work at Oasis is done in a lab flooded with sunlight through giant picture windows. White walls, white floor, white counters, racks of glass beakers, precision measuring equipment — the little room appears designed for experiments with cultures and microbes rather than for grape testing.
On the walls of the lab, the Salahis keep graphs showing the rise of sugar content and the fall of acidity in their grapes. “We’re not just looking for the right sugar content,” Corrine explained. “A perfect balance is more important than just sugar content,” she said, adding that the East Coast, and Virginia in particular, produces grapes of better acidic levels than does California with its much hotter summers.
Once that point of perfect balance is reached, there’s precious little time to waste. “Today, we find out — tomorrow, we pick,” Corrine said.
In the early morning hours while temperatures are still cool (to increase the likelihood that the grape juice will better retain odor and flavor), the pickers begin filling their baskets. The baskets are emptied into tractor-towed grape wagons pulled up and down the rows of the 35 producing acre& at Oasis.
The wagon races back and forth to the winery, transferring its cargo to the stem separator before the sun baking down on the fruit can change sugar or acidity levels by even a fraction of a percentage point. The separator also removes any rotten fruit but if the wagonloads brought in Thursday were any indication, it’s a task called for infrequently. Of the hundreds of pounds of grapes carried by the wagon, all looked perfect.
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