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Monday, August 3, 2015

Cluster Counting

One of the things that we could do even in the sweltering heat was to update our plant count and at the same time, do a cluster count. We don't have any Chardonnay clusters and we only have 20 clusters on our Auxerrois, so at best, we hope to be able to taste our Auxerrois to see what kinds of flavors we can achieve. We do have approximately 465 healthy Chenin Blanc plants and a conservative count of the clusters gives a total of 366 clusters.
Another way to look at the count of our plants and clusters is to see it as a graph. It is not surprising that the rows with the most plants gives the most clusters.
In the chart below, the vertical axis, Y1 denoted by the blue circles gives the number of clusters and Y2 denoted by the green bar graph shows the number of plants. The horizontal axis is the row information.
The question is, what can we do with a mere 366 clusters. I looked at a previous blogpost, that I called How Many Grapes Does It Take to Make a Bottle of Wine and did some calculations. I assumed that each cluster will have a weight of approximately 0.2 pounds and multiplied it by the number of clusters, 366, which amounts to approximately 73 pounds. Looking at the chart, 912 pounds equals 73 gallons, so 73 pounds equals 5.84 gallons. A few years ago, when my husband and I began our journey into grape growing and winemaking, my friend gave me her winemaking kit so, somewhere deep in the bowels of our basement, I have a 5 gallon jug. I'm thinking of making some wine from our Chenin Blanc.

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