Why We Pick When We Pick
Every fall, someone asks us the same question while walking through the tasting room. How do you know when it is time to pick the grapes? The honest answer is that it isn’t one number, and it isn’t a guess either. It’s a negotiation between three measurements, the calendar, and a healthy amount of patience.
The three numbers that matter
Brix measures sugar content in the grape, and it is the number most people have heard of. Higher Brix means more sugar, which means more potential alcohol once fermentation converts that sugar. We are typically looking for a range in the mid-20s, high enough for richness and body, but not so high that the wine tips into something heavy or overly boozy.
pH measures acidity on a chemical level, and it matters more than people expect. Low pH keeps a wine feeling fresh, age-worthy, and microbiologically stable. High pH can make a wine taste flat or age poorly, no matter how good the sugar numbers look.
TA, or titratable acidity, is a companion number to pH. Together, the two acidity measurements tell us whether a grape has enough backbone to support the wine it is about to become.
Why you cannot just wait for perfect
Here is the frustrating part. Sugar and acidity do not always cooperate. Brix keeps climbing the longer fruit hangs on the vine, but acidity drops at the same time. Wait too long and you get a wine with plenty of sugar and alcohol but no structure to hold it together. Pick too early and you get bright acidity with underripe, green flavors. The art of picking is finding the window where both numbers land in a good place at the same time, and that window can be maddeningly short.
If we are ever forced to choose, we lean toward protecting acidity. A wine with slightly higher sugar than ideal is still very workable. A wine with acid that has already collapsed is much harder to fix.
It is a team decision, not a solo call
Picking is not something we decide alone from a spreadsheet. Our fruit comes from Red Mountain vineyards, and the growers on site are checking Brix, pH, and TA constantly as harvest approaches, sometimes multiple times in a single week. We stay in close contact with them, comparing notes and talking through what the numbers are telling us. Once the fruit looks ready, there is also the very real logistics puzzle of transportation and processing schedules to line up, since a vineyard rarely has just one client waiting on a pick.
Why this matters more than people realize
Picking decisions shape a wine more than almost anything that happens afterward in the cellar. Winemaking technique can smooth over a lot of things, but it cannot manufacture structure that was never there in the fruit. That is why we spend so much time watching numbers, checking vineyards, and sometimes waiting an extra few days even when everyone is eager to get moving.
So the next time you taste a Genoa red and it feels balanced, bright, and structured all at once, that balance started weeks earlier, out in a Red Mountain vineyard, with a grower checking numbers and deciding it was finally time.
Curious what this season's numbers are looking like? Ask us in the Woodinville Warehouse Tasting Room, harvest talk is some of our favorite talk.
