Wine 101 #2-Brix

I took grape samples today. The Copeland Vineyard Chardonnay and Syrah are 17.8 and 18.2 brix respectively. This means we are a still a few weeks away from harvesting as we like to see roughly 25 Brix (less for white wines) when we harvest (this is not a hard number as we also look at acid and flavors when determining harvest).

When taking brix readings in the winery we always get a lot of questions from guests about what exactly a brix is.

That said I thought this a good occassion to hold the second Wine 101 "class." Brix is a scale used to measure the percent of dissolved sugar in a solution at 20 degrees celcius. This scale was developed by Adolf Ferdinand Wenceslaus Brix and is used primarily in winemaking and fruit juices (brewers use the Plato scale; why I have no idea). Simply, a brix is a way to quantify how sweet the grapes are.

While the juice is still juice (ie not fermenting) we use a refractometer to measure the brix. For pure simplicity and functionality's sake this is my favorite tool we use. Very simply the refractometer measures the sugar through the degree at which light going through the solution is bent. The more sugar a solution has the more the light will be bent. So simple. I love it.

This is a refractometer.



Although blurry this is what one sees when looking into the refractometer. There is a numbered scale in the middle and where the blue crosses is how many brix you have.