Good Sun, Soil and Water = Good Wine

How do these three elements create an experience of tasting good wine that is cause for a gathering of you and one or more of your friends?
Sun soil and water, unpredictable combinations provided by nature, what a grower must work with and respond to so that a wine quality grape is produced. That quality grape will provide the Wine Maker the best opportunity to excite your palate.

THE SUN
Sunshine is bright and white yet it actually is an array of colors, an array that captures our attention when it hits water just right. Within a rainbow are two specific colors, blue and red, that promote the growth we see. Blue stimulates vegetative growth and the combination of blue and red stimulate flowering, the irony is that we are not able to see blue and red in sunlight except when it hits water and the color is separated into the spectrum we call a rainbow.
Grapevines do flower; I have seen them, although I have never really thought of them as flowers because they are so small. Grapevine flowers almost look like clusters of dust with little to no color other than green and when pollinated that is where their little clusters begin forming into grapes initially looking like little green sprouts.

THE SOIL
What can be said about soil? We walk on it, build on it, cover it and yet on a daily basis we never really think about it unless you have children out playing in it then you are trying to wash it out. There is so much that I take for granted when it comes to soil; walking into a grocery and picking up some fresh avocados, tomatoes, broccoli and Almond milk.
I have never been looking at the avocados thinking to myself “I wonder what the Cation exchange capacity is for the soil where these avocados were grown”
Cat – i – on: a positively charged ion; i.e., one that would be attracted to the cathode in
electrolysis.
Cation exchange capacity: is that which affects the soil’s inherent fertility and its ability in
holding nutrients.
I am sure glad someone is though, because what good would the fruits and vegetables we eat be if there was no nutrition for them to pull out of the ground as they grow and become edible?
If you use something long enough you will wear it out including the soil, rotating crops definitely helps most foods but it is just not possible to rotate a vineyard.
THE WATER
Did you know that the amount of water given to a vine is reduced during the growing season? A vine receives the needed water during the budding and flowering period and toward the end of the season during the ripening period the amount of water provided is reduced; this causes the vine to direct its resources to the grape clusters as opposed to growing additional foliage.

Controlling the amount of water provided to a vine helps create a skin to juice ratio that is preferable for wine making, controlling the water is called Water Stress. As with any food when you add to much water you can dilute the food so that it does not taste good any more. This can occur with a vineyard, if the vineyard does not receive an appropriate amount of water the grapes will either be to small and biter or to large and flavor less.

What is good water?  The best water for drinking has a pH of 7; it has less than five molecules per cluster and is free from organic matter.  If you are going to water a vine the water should be appealing to your own nose and tongue.  If it is full of chemicals it will impact your vine.

Here is an odd use of wine:
Most of us know that wine has healing properties but did you know that wine, being “the most curious, funny and available electrolyte” says Victor Karpov, has also been patented to heal unproductive areas of solar panels? Yup, the patent truly exists.