New Temperature Controlled Fermentation Chamber

Last year, my husband took our refrigerator and turned it into a dedicated temperature controlled fermentation chamber. Earlier this year, old faithful refrigerator-cum-fermentation-chamber bit the dust. What can I say, it was about 30 years old. We postponed getting a replacement but NOW is the time. My husband looked on line and found HomeBrewTalk.com where they had all the specifications for Sizing Your Corny Kegs for Fermentation.
After cluster counting and bagging our grapes, we feel that we will at least have twice as much juice as we had last year. (Last year, we had 70 pounds of grapes that yielded 5 gallons of juice). This presented a problem regarding what type of fermentation vessel we should invest in. There was no question about using stainless steel again, but the question was what size?

We already have two one-sixth barrels that can hold approximately 5 gallons each. We feel that we may have about 12 gallons of juice this year. We want to give enough head space for the fermenting must to allow for the initial foaming, so we went with two slim-quarters to hold our juice. Once we decided on the type of keg, the following layout plan from HomeBrewTalk helped us decide what kind of chest freezer would work to hold our kegs.

We got lucky. Even though all of this necessary equipment is being purchased at the eleventh hour, we were able to get the chest freezer on sale with delivery on Thursday, September 1st and our two one-quarter stainless steel Sanke kegs are arriving today.
References:
1. Barrel Sizes photo from: Wort-O-Matic.com.

Late-season fungicide sprays in grapes and potential effects on fermentation

My husband shared this article with me from Michigan State University called Late-season fungicide sprays in grapes and potential effects on fermentation. I thought about one of the questions that I had to answer when I took the U.C. Davis Enology and Viticulture Certification course. The question consisted of a very long scenario which included the fact that the original fruit was in excellent condition and then "Why was there the odor of sulfides emanating from a tank of fermenting Chenin blanc." I answered the question as best as I could but totally missed the mark. The key is "original fruit was in excellent condition". At that time, I couldn't connect the fact that fruit in excellent condition may be the result of a well executed spray schedule that included sulfur as a fungicide.
The above article is all about late season use of fungicide sprays and the pre-harvest interval or PHI timing of sprays and its effects on fermentation.
Here is my summary:

Fungicide	Pre-Harvest Interval (PHI)	Effect on Fermentation
Oxidate	Day of harvest	No issues
Biofungicide Serenade	Day of harvest	No issues
Sulfur	5-6 weeks	H2S (hydrogen sulfide) or rotten egg smell
Copper	Late season usage	Copper is toxic to yeast and even non-lethal doses of copper can cause stress on the yeast, potentially leading to incomplete fermentation and release of undesirable metabolites, all leading to wine aroma defects
Captan	Late season usage	Can delay the start of alcoholic fermentation, captan-treated grapes retained a definite cloudiness after six months of storage
Manzate	66 days before harvest	Preventing chemical residue and degradation product left on fruit; not necessarily affecting fermentation
Ridomil MZ	66 days before harvest	Preventing chemical residue and degradation product left on fruit; not necessarily affecting fermentation
potassium bicarbonate (Kaligreen, Armicarb, Milstop)	Late season usage	Contains potassium so best to avoid a heavy application shortly before harvest
Botryticides Elevate, Vangard and Scala	Late season usage	Safe for both alcoholic and malolactic fermentation
strobilurins (i.e., Sovran, Abound)	Late season usage	No effect on fermentation but late-season use of strobilurins is not recommended due to possible fungicide resistance issues
sterol inhibitors (i.e., Elite, Rally)	Late season usage	No effect on fermentation
powdery mildew fungicide Quintec	Late season usage	No effect on fermentation
JMS Stylet Oil	Good late-season spray to reduce powdery mildew and European red mite	Some evidence that late applications depress Brix (sugar) accumulation due to a temporary reduction in photosynthesis; other California studies show no effect on fermentation

Bird Damage and Wedding Bags in the Vineyard

While we were busy with putting in the irrigation, there were things that got pushed down the list of thing to do, such as cluster counting. Cluster counting is not an onerous thing, it just needs to get done. Our friend Mary, came by on August 2 so that we could have some idea of how much netting we needed to order. Last year, we had our first, very small crop of grapes and we ordered a netting called tightlock, from our supplier. It worked perfectly to keep out even little insects.

So, after Mary counted all of the grape clusters that she could see, my husband called our supplier to order the netting. We then got some very bad news, our supplier was all out of tightlock netting. We should not be surprised since this type of order should really be placed much earlier than the middle of August. We were in a quandry, what to do, what to do. Then, we remembered that on one of the forums that my husband belongs to, there is a grape grower in Japan who bags all of their grapes. We decided that we could do that for our grapes as well, so my husband went on line to check out how much these bags would cost. It was little cost prohibitive for the 1000 or so clusters that we have. Ever the resourceful person, my husband looked up wedding organza bags and we decided to go with wedding bags in the vineyard.
We ordered 1000 wedding organze bags about 10 days ago. Our son was here this weekend so we put him to work.

Most of our Chenin blanc are around 8 ^oBrix or so. But some of our Chenin blanc grapes are at 16 ^oBrix! It's a little early this year, compared to last year when we saw turkeys eating our grapes, this year, we are seeing bird damage. With our son's help, we were able to bag almost half of the Chenin blanc grape clusters.

Irrigation Manifold Assembly

At the same time that Tony and his crew were installing the pump and motor, my husband was busy assembling the irrigation manifold.

My husband made the assembly in three sections so that each section weighed approximately the same amount and will make it easier when it comes time to disassemble the system for storage during the winter. I'll walk you through the system beginning on the lower right hand side of the above picture.
First is the well and the blowout pipe on the ground. The wire that you also see in the picture below is for the pressure sensor:

On the scaffold, the first section of the irrigation assembly consists of the following:

The Y-strainer and a backflow preventer come next in the assembly.

The third section consists of the following two pictures. The disc filter and the continuous air vent:

With the manifold assembled, we are ready for the water!

Irrigation: More Things To Do

Tony and his team came to put the pump and motor into the well, so it was our turn to get busy putting in the irrigation lines. The first thing that needed to be done was to mark the line posts to indicate where the wire must be secured. Then, the wire had to be paid out and secured with the clip as shown on the photo at the right. After those two things happened, the hose could then be placed on the wire with plastic "curls", and with a nod to the (winter) Olympics, in a task that we called "curling".
Then, my husband married the flexible riser hose with the irrigation hose using a permalock valve.

When all was said and done, we had 7 irrigation zones.

As soon as we had a zone completed, we activated the irrigation and have been doing rotations since July 23rd when we started with Zone 6 and 7, our eastern most zones comprised of Chardonnay clones 76 and 96 and the red varieites, Cabernet sauvignon clone 412 and Cabernet franc clones 214 and 327.
Phew!

Rain!

It has been more than 10 weeks since the last time that we recorded an inch of rain. We have watched with hope as rain systems made it's way across Connecticut, only to be disappointed as the gray clouds parted and the sun shown through right as the rain bearing system approached our vineyard.
We were not to be denied on August 10 and August 11th, we had a continual rainfall that accumulated to about 1-1/4 inches!

Here is the rainfall that we have been having to date:

DATE	AMOUNT of RAINFALL
May 30	1 inch
July 29	1/2 inch
August 1	1/4 inch
August 10-11	1-1/4 inch
August 22	1-1/4 inch
September 6	1/2 inch
September 19	1-3/4 inch
October 22	2 inches
October 30	3 inches

Grapes at Bunch Closure

Some of our grapes are at the bunch closure stage:

While it is very heartening to see our grapes looking this healthy, some of our other bunches suffered the lack of rain that we experienced during the months of June and July before our irrigation system came on line. In the photo below, you can see that some of the grapes in the bunch have raisinated.

What we have been doing is to take tweezers and gently remove these raisinated grapes.

We can do this because after we did our Cluster Counting, we have determined that we have approximately 800 grape clusters. After counting clusters, we were able to decide just how much netting we should purchase, but when we called our supplier, he was all out of the netting that we used last year to protect our grapes. A short period of panic set in, but stay tuned for how we solved our problem of the lack of netting.

Getting Close to Having Running Water

On June 29th, Tony and his crew came to install our Pitless Adaptor, the first step in getting our well fitted to provide us with running water. Two weeks ago, on Wednesday, July 20, Tony and his crew came back to install our variable speed drive pump and motor.

Tony brought a Berkeley L30P4JMGS and I went on line and found this information:
The Berkeley L30P4JMGS is a replacement liquid pump end, MGS stainless steel series, for use on existing motor. The precision-engineered, high-quality, rugged MGS stainless steel series pumps deliver efficient and dependable performance even in rough, aggressive water. Built to deliver long-term trouble-free service, these pumps feature the SignaSeal staging system.

The features include:

• Capacity (GPM): 30
• Staging system incorporates a harder-than-sand ceramic wear surface that when incorporated with the floating impeller design, greatly reduces problems with abrasives, sand lock-up and running dry
• 300 grade stainless steel discharge is corrosion-resistant for durability in aggressive water
• Large octagon wrench area for ease of installation
• Exclusive self-lubricating Nylatron discharge bearing resists wear from sand
• Corrosion-resistant 300 grade stainless steel intake for durability in aggressive water
• Positive drive from 7/16 in. hexagonal heavy-duty 300 grade stainless steel shaft
• Stainless steel coupling press fit to pump shaft. Couples to all standard NEMA motors
• Durable internal spring-loaded check valve
• Corrosion-resistant stainless steel cable guard protects motor leads.
• Tapered ends prevent pump from catching on well

The motor that drives the pump is a Pentair motor Pentek model P4300050A3 which is a 5hp 60Hz motor. What I didn't know about the pump and the motor is that they are submersible. In order to do that, Tony and his crew attached both the pump and the motor to the end of the pipe that they brought with them. Three hundred feet of 2-inch galvanzied pipe was prepared to be lowered into the well and the final length of pipe was fit with the male portion of the pitless adaptor.
The crew worked efficiently and in no time, the well was prepared for the next step---energizing! More on that to come in a future post.

Cluster Counting

We have had very little rainfall in the past 3 months, in addition to a heat wave that lasted for 9 days beginning on July 20. High heat coupled with no rain leads to no sugar transport into the young grapes. Fortunately, our irrigation system went on line on Friday, July 22, just in the nick of time.
We are right on track with what we were doing last year: 2015 Cluster Counting. With so few plants producing grapes, but more than we had last year, we need to count each cluster to make some projections for how we will be vinifying the grapes that we have. We began cluster counting yesterday. Many of the clusters were located on struggling vines so those clusters had to be dropped.

However, one of the dropped clusters was due to an errant slip of the pruning shears. We took advantage of this mistake to weigh the cluster and take the Brix reading with a refractometer. Our Brix registered at 4.6 degrees.
If last year is any indication of grape development, the grapes will be entering veraison (the onset of ripening) at the end of the month. We have more cluster counting to do in order to make some projections on how much wine we can potentially make.