Fruit Variabilty

In an earlier post I speculated about how to deal with harvested fruit that may vary from under ripe to raisined. Yesterday ran across this article by Mark Greenspan on the Wine Business Monthly website which addresses this topic.

I think that it's a fair statement that if you ignore variability in the grape, your wine will tend towards mediocrity.... Winegrowers need to pay closer attention to the cream of their crop and how to prevent blending it in with the lesser fruit from their vineyards.

...Great wine can only come from great grapes...There are numerous factors in any vineyard that can limit the potential fruit quality, regardless of how ripe the fruit is...but it often does come down to uniformity of ripeness.

So my earlier speculation that variability in ripeness may add to a wine's complexity seems pretty clearly refuted here. The question becomes how high of a cost is a winemaker willing to pay for uniform ripeness? I think I would be willing to discard a significant percentage of the grapes that show up at my winery door. We will see...