Vintage 2025: Chenin Blanc Harvest and Pressing - Part 1

As harvest time approaches, we are weather watchers and the forecast was for a frost on Friday morning, October 10. When we drove to the vineyard, the grass was covered with a coating of frost but the vineyard itself was spared the frost. The leaves on the vines were still green and the sun came up. The early crew raised the nets in preparation for harvesting the first round of Chenin Blanc.

Our harvesters gathered at the 10 a.m. start time. We had some new harvesters including Kim, Mark, Erica, and Ava, and Dan, John and Andolfo from Greystone.

We harvested 8 rows of Chenin Blanc. From raising the nets, one break to "grapes all in" took from 8:00 to 2:00.

By the time we had "lunch" it was after 2, but the sun was up and we enjoyed the time with our harvesters. My husband pulled out the 2020 Chenin Blanc to serve with lunch.
On the following day, Saturday, October 11, we took our harvest to Stonington Vineyards to be pressed. We are so fortunate that Mike and his crew, Dakota and Jim are so accommodating and willing to help us on a weekend! We pulled up the rental truck to their loading dock and put the lugs of grapes into their press. They were also harvesting their Cabernet Franc and the destemmer-crusher was on the other end of their loading dock.
I am a fan of loading docks! I hope we can incorporate a loading dock into our future winery at the vineyard.
Because we press our grapes as whole clusters, we had to do two pressings. The first press took from 9:30 to 12:00. We put in 81 lugs worth of grapes.
After the first pressing we had approximately 170 gallons of juice. Our IBC transport tank can hold 300 gallons of pressed juice so we had to go back to our winery space at Taugwonk Spur to round up as many cleaned kegs as we could. The second press of 83 lugs took from 12:30 to 3:00.

The 300 gallon IBC tank and the kegs that we brought back to Stonington Vineyards accommodated the rest of the juice from the second pressing. We measured the Brix using our hydrometer and the numbers for the first Chenin harvest looks like this:

Variety	Weight	Volume	Brix	pH	TA
Chenin Blanc rows 1-8	4375 pounds	350 gallons	23.0	3.02	8.90 g/L

Thank you to everyone who helped in harvesting round one of our Chenin Blanc! We really appreciate our community of harvesters and the great group at Stonington Vineyards!

2015 La Croix des Loges Bonnezeaux

A few nights ago, we had our friends over for an end of summer barbecue pork ribs, corn bread and salad dinner. For the dinner, we had a 2020 Robert Foley Napa Valley Charbono. It was the perfect pairing.
For dessert, we made a fig and brie tart drizzled with honey and sprinkled with fresh thyme. For this dessert, my husband brought out a 2015 La Croix des Loges Bonnezeaux which he claims to have found in the "remainders bin" at one of the wine stores that we frequented.
The La Croix des Loges is a sweet wine made in the Anjou in the western region of the Loire Valley of France. This sweet wine is made exclusively from Chenin Blanc. The origin of this style of wine is attributed to Jean Boivin who spent time in Sauterne and learned the technique of making 'noble rot' botrytized wine.¹

This technique involves multiple passes through the vineyard over a period of days and weeks, in which the only grapes picked are the very ripest and those affected by the'noble rot' botrytis.
Our interest in this Bonnezeaux is that we also make a botrytized Chenin Blanc when the conditions are right. 2023 was such a year and we bottled 36 half bottles of 'noble rot' infected Chenin Blanc.
Needless to say, the brie and the figs were a perfect compliment to the Bonnezeaux!
It is definitely a recipe that we would like to try again. It was simple to make at the end of dinner. Dufour puff pastry made with real butter was the essential ingredient, topped with brie, figs, fresh thyme and honey. It took only 25 minutes in the oven and the result was a piping hot dessert to pair with the La Croix des Loges. I'm already thinking that the next iteration will involve the making of individual brie and fig tartlets so that each tart has the perfect puff pastry crust surrounding it!
References:
1. Bonnezeaux Wine.

Vintage 2025: Chardonnay Harvest and Pressing

On another beautiful day, September 28, our friends came to help us harvest the Chardonnay. Our friends, Laurie, Elizabeth, Bob and Ted came early to help us lift the nets and we were ready to harvest around 9 a.m. Since we have 8 rows of Chardonnay, our strategy was to do two rows in one pass from the south end to the north end and then return doing two rows from the north end to the south end.
Here are photos of the people who came to help us:

We had a few new people join our crew: Carol, Dori, Kathy and Charlotte. They all picked up on how we harvest our grapes and were a terrific addition to our crew. Charlotte in the brown and white polka-dotted shirt made sure that none of the grapes remained on the vine and went back and checked. Here you can see her with a fist full of grapes!
We collected the filled lugs as we went along, and here you can see Ted, making sure that each lug has been properly filled and stacked in the back of our trailer.

Once we reached the south end, the lugs were put into the rental van and it was time for a break. We did two of these 4 row passes and finished up around 12:30. We served lunch and my husband opened up the 2020 Chardonnay for the harvesters to sample. It was an enjoyable time and we hope that our crew had fun, even though we know that harvesting is difficult work.
On Monday, we took the grapes to Stonington Vineyard, where Mike, Jim and Dakota were waiting for us to arrive at 9 a.m. They have a very efficient process there. The pressing took 2-1/2 hours and we were done by noon. The juice that came out of the grapes looked really good and we took a sample to get some harvest numbers.

Variety	Weight	Volume	Brix	pH	TA
Chardonnay	1950 pounds	156 gallons	22.0	3.28	8.0 g/L

On Monday afternoon, we took the washed lugs back to our vineyard. The picture there was one of a calm end of summer day. It would be hard to imagine that a day ago, there was such frenetic harvesting activity going on!

Thank you to all our harvesters who spent their Sunday helping us bring in our Chardonnay crop!

Vintage 2025: Auxerrois Pressing and Statistics

On Monday afternoon, September 22, we took the Auxerrois to Stonington Vineyards for pressing. Mike, Jim and Dakota were there and helped us to unload 78 full lugs of Auxerrois into their press.

The pressing took approximately 2 hours. During that time, we were able to rinse out our lugs. When the pressing was done we had approximately 160 gallons of juice.

We brought the juice back to our winery located on Taugwonk Spur which is less than 5 minutes away from Stonington Vineyards. Once there, we unloaded the IBC tank and took the hydrometer reading for the 2025 Auxerrois.

We held back a smaller amount of juice to get the numbers for pH and titratable acidity. The statistics for the 2025 Auxerrois are:

Variety	Weight	Volume	Brix	pH	TA
Axerrois	1950 pounds	160 gallons	21.0	3.24	5.30 g/L