Happy Halloween Harvest

Our penultimate harvest occurred on Halloween! We had a skeleton crew of friends that came to help us harvest our red varieties. Since the red harvest was a small one and there were only 5 rows, we were confident that our friends would rise to the challenge. We began taking in the clothespins around 8:30 and the nets were raised. The crew was divided between the two rows of Cabernet Sauvignon and the one row of Barbera which we harvested, working from the south end to the north end. Once at the north end, the Cabernet Sauvignon (16 lugs) and Barbera (2 lugs) were loaded on to our truck and we worked our way from the north end to the south end harvesting Cabernet Franc (28 lugs). This harvest with our crew was done at 11!
A smaller group headed to our Taugwonk facility where we set up to stomp the harvest. The Cabernet Franc grapes went into a large tub, the one we used when we had our first harvests of Chenin Blanc. Mary showed Geoff and Bob how we put on the food grade plastic booties, got into the tub and stomped away!

Our first volunteer was Bob, who got bootied up and went into the Cabernet Franc to stomp! After doing a bit of stomping in the Cabernet Franc, he ceded his duty to Geoff and got into the gray tub with the small amount of Cabernet Sauvignon and Barbera.

It was now Geoff's turn and he did a great job of getting the juice out of the Cabernet Franc!

Here is photo of what the stomping looked like on a beautiful, Halloween day. After the stomping was done, we took some of the juice and took a hydrometer reading. We also sampled the juice and the Cabernet Franc at 25 degrees Brix was the sweetest grape juice ever!

Variety	Weight	Volume of Juice	Brix	pH	TA
Cabernet Sauvignon - Barbera Mix	140 lbs	10 gal	22.0	3.3	9.90 g/L
Cabernet Fanc	300 lbs	24 gal	25.0	3.5	8.20 g/L

Once again, a big thank you to everyone who came out to help us with our red harvest. Halloween was indeed a happy one for us and not scary at all!

Harvesting the Chenin Blanc

On Sunday, October 20, our friends gathered to help us harvest the first 8 rows of Chenin Blanc. During the days leading up to the harvest, my husband and I meticulously dropped the green bunches of grapes that didn't past the Brix text. My husband was sampling them while I was using the hand held refractometer.
On Sunday, we harvested 90 lugs of grapes in 3 hours! The first hour, from 8-9 our friends came to help us lift the nets in the 8 rows. There was a short break at 9 and we gathered into two groups working from the south end to the north end in rows 1 to 4. We paired up where one person held the lug and the other person cut the grapes. We had two runners in each of the alleys watching for full lugs and swapping them out with empty lugs. My husband and two people were in the alley between the rows that people were working in. They would retrieve the full lugs from the runners and ensure that the lugs were full and stacked them. In this way, we were able to do 4 rows in 1 hour!

Once the group reached the north end, we shifted over to rows 5-8 and did the same process harvesting from the north end to the south end. When we were done, it was 11 a.m.! It was a gorgeous day and people stayed for lunch. My husband brought out a tasting of Chenin Blanc 2019 and 2020 so that people could taste the wine that was made from the grapes they harvested.
The next day, Monday, October 21, we went to Stonington Vineyards to take the 90 lugs of grapes for pressing. Mike McAndrew's crew, Jim and Dakota helped us load the press and by 8:30, the pressing was underway!
We took a sample of the juice and recorded the Brix, pH and TA.
I began writing this blogpost last week but a week has already gone by and another Chenin Blanc harvest occured on Sunday, October 27. It was another perfect morning with temperatures in the mid-50s and sunny. This time, our friends exceeded even last weeks' harvest record, picking 8-1/2 rows of Chenin Blanc by 10:35! I think we are on to something with this method! We celebrated the last big harvest with our friends. Brunch was served and sticking to tradition, we provided a sparkling wine to mark the occasion!
On Monday, October 28, we took the grapes to Stonington Vineyard and had it pressed. The pressing was done by 10:30 and we took the juice back to our industrial space at Taugwonk.
These are the numbers for the two Chenin Blanc harvests with a comparison to the original numbers taken on October 6.

Variety	Weight	Volume of Juice	Brix	pH	TA
Chenin Blanc-statistical sampling	NA	NA	17.0	3.0	NA
Chenin Blanc- Rows 1 to 8	1980 lbs	160 gallons	20.5	3.15	9.5 g/L
Chenin Blanc- Rows 9 to 17	1875 lbs	150 gallons	21.5	3.18	9.8 g/L

We hope people enjoyed being part of the harvest! We want to thank all of our friends who came to help! And a huge thank you to Mike, Jim and Dakota!

Dropping Unripe Chenin Blanc

We are seeing some strange behavior from our grape varieties this year. I wrote about the Mystery in the Vineyard where our Chardonnay, Cabernet Sauvignon, Cabernet Franc and Barbera leaves fell off. There is something else that we are noticing now that our Chenin Blanc harvest is coming up this Sunday, October 20 and the following Sunday, October 27.
On October 6, we picked a representative sample of Chenin Blanc from the 17 rows that we have. We split the sampling into the two clones, 982 and FPS-1. Both clones came in with numbers that were very low: 17 Brix and pH of 3.0. We decided then that we needed to drop some of the green berries in the rows. We began last week and saw many grape clusters that had brown peduncles and had shriveled and died on the vine. Along with those grapes, we saw many green bunches where the Brix ranged from 8-15 Brix. There were other grapes that were ripening normally and we think that in our sampling, we got a mixture of these green and ripe berries giving us an average Brix of 17.

The good news is that there is very little botrytis rot. We hope to finish dropping the unripe grapes by the time harvest approaches. After pressing, I will report the Brix, pH and TA. Stay tuned!

Winery Work is 90% Cleaning!

One thing that we learned at Jonathan Edwards when we made our wine there was that 90% of winery work is cleaning! We are learning that quickly as we try to set up our own process for making wine and racking wine.
In order to ferment the 2024 Auxerrois and Chardonnay juice that we brought back from being pressed at Stonington Vineyards, we had to first clean some barrels for the Chardonnay and then move the 2023 Chenin Blanc finished wine from the tank into barrels and kegs to free up the tank for the 2024 Auxerrois.
The steps involved:

• Making up the cleaning solutions
• Finding and cleaning the barrels and kegs that we thought the wine would go into
• Setting up the pump and the transfer lines
• Cleaning the barrels, kegs and lines

The above process is complicated in our space because we don't have drains in the floor. My husband devised a method by which we could work around this situation by contacting our Porta-Potty company who said that they would come to pump out the waste matter from an IBC tank that we would fill.
On October 2, we tested our process by cleaning two stainless steel barrels and then transferring our Chardonnay into the cleaned barrels. That took the better part of the afternoon into the early evening!
The following day, the Chardonnay was inoculated and the fermentation was started. Confident in our method, we tackled the 160-gallon tank that we had our 2023 Chenin Blanc in. We first cleaned a barrel and several kegs and the transfer from the tank to the barrel and kegs went smoothly.
Next came the task of cleaning the tank. One complication was that although we put in on-demand pressurized hot water, (please see our blogpost: Industrail Space Upgrade), we did not have any hot water!
We carried on and after the wine transfer, this is what the inside of the tank looked like. My husband washed it out with cold water and since we had a tea kettle, we made numerous pots of boiling water. You can see the progress in these photos:

The entire process of cleaning the tank took one hour! We think that the tank could have been cleaned in at least half the time if we had running hot pressurized water. However, we were really happy with the result. Clean tank!