Ripeness in viticulture

Time for the grape harvest. One can ask if isn't it too early, but the vineyard calendar seems to be constantly changing and challenging for wine producers. The grape harvest I'm talking about is what we call "sofralık" in Turkish, literally meaning "for the table," for the grapes that are not meant to end in bottles, but to be eaten out of hand as fresh fruit.

Years ago, during the harvest season, I was strolling in the streets of Kalecik, a small town close to Ankara, when I noticed a strange handwritten note on a box of grapes for sale. It wrote "şişe kaçkını," with a rough translation meaning "escaped from the bottle." Of course I said to myself, just the right wording; these were the grapes that were not good enough for the bottle.

In his high-rise office in Beirut, Sandro Saade carefully chews a merlot grape from a vineyard hundreds of miles away in war-ravaged Syria, trying to determine if it is ripe enough to order the start of the harvest.