Day 5 - 23rd FebruaryIt’s a grey day in Paradise It’s a great day to roll the dice..and pick our Pinot Noir. We have four clones of Pinot here at Bloodwood. They are 777; 114; 115 and MV6. I’m sure that information means everything to you as a Bloodwood Pinot devotee. It also means quite a deal to us. You see, they all ripen at slightly different times with 777 being our earliest and MV6 our latest. Now I’m only talking about days here but in deciding the timing of our Pinot harvest, days are all we have from a perfect Pinot showing all the perfume, structure and fruit density that we strive for here at Bloodwood, to an overripe, spiky alcohol heavy overblown less than convincing light dry red. As it is impossible to have any picking team visit four times over a week to pick around four tonnes of fruit, we harvest them all in the same session. And that grey day session was between 7am and 10 am today. Here’s a quick explainer of the roles each of our clones play in the delivery of our Pinot Noir. The 777 provides the deep velvety fruit, the 114 and 115 contribute to the overall structure and weight while the last to ripen MV6 stamps its fine aromas and lifted acidity on the final must composition. I make the decision on picking date based upon the 777 being fully ripe around 13.5Be and co-ferment the remaining clones with an aim of around 13Be in the final must. The MV6 also ensures that the pH and T/A (total acidity) are adequate to prevent the wine blowing out though the malo-lactic conversion which means we have no need or desire for acid adjustment to prevent that dead fruit pH character I see in too many Pinot Noirs. Well that’s the idea in an ideal wine making world.
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