Crush 2015

After harvesting our Chenin Blanc, the key thing was to take the fruit to the crush pad (aka home basement) as soon as possible. Since our home is minutes away from our vineyard, this was not a problem. We weighed the harvest and it came in at 65 pounds. I was a little disappointed because I had done a pre-calculation and was hoping for approximately 90 pounds, since I thought that 90 pounds would give us about 5 gallons of juice.
Prior to harvest, one of the dilemmas was how to crush such a small amount of fruit under sanitary conditions to extract the juice. We didn't have a problem with the lack of a distemmer because we had already decided to press the grapes on the rachis, i.e. whole cluster pressing.
Our solution was to use our cooler, which is food grade and put the grapes into food grade nylon bags used by beer brewers for steeping their hops and grains. Our friends filled up the bags with the grapes. Once the bags were filled with grapes, it went into the cooler. Okay, now what, you ask.

Well, I am really found of the traditional way of doing things so I would often tell my husband that I wanted to stomp on the grapes like they used to do in the old country. This year, my wish came true. In preparation for grape stomping, our friends put on the very effective foot protection, called a Hefty Jumbo Bag with adjustable sliders then they stomped on the grapes in a good rendition of "I Love Lucy---Grape Stomping Episode". Okay, I know that some of you are too young to remember "I Love Lucy", so here is the link to the Grape Stomping Episode. Here is our own version of channeling Lucy:

This turned out to be a very gentle and but effective way of getting out the juice because from 65 pounds of grapes, our yield was 6 gallons of juice!