Comments:  The primitivo made incremental ripening progress across the board.  We were expecting more progress in sugar given the warm, sunny week just past, but the timing of irrigation relative to the sampling, and sampling error itself, probably caused the brix value to bounce around a little.  The healthy drop in acidity suggests that there might be some irrigation dilution factored in.  Nevertheless, it’s now looking like a solidly mid-September harvest, so 2-3 weeks out.

The tempranillo made healthy progress across the board.  We anticipate the TA being below 0.40% when the brix are acceptable.  We’re projecting harvest as 2 weeks out for the tempranillo.

The first reading for barbera, which we took mainly to show some data to our many barbera clients, shows the expected decent brix level coupled with the characteristically high acidity.    Late September remains a good bet here, but the values are encouraging enough that we might refine that to mid-late September with some more data.  Crop load and cluster size is modest, so time is on our side if we can avoid a major heat spike.