Auxerrois Harvest

During the Labor Day weekend, we were constantly checking the track of hurricane Hermine up the East Coast. We had a small amount of Auxerrois that we had been babying to ripeness and decided on Monday afternoon to harvest the grapes. There were approximately 70 clusters so it took no time at all to get the grapes harvested, but we did the harvest while the winds were gusting to at least 20 mph!

When we brought the grapes home, the approximately 70 clusters weighed 8.5 pounds. I know, it is a very small amount. We put the fruit in our refrigerator to cool the grapes in order to preserve as much of the aromatics as we could. We deliberated on the best way to extract the juice.

On September 6, we brought the grapes out of the refrigerator and put them into the nylon bag and placed the bag in a food grade container. We began to squeeze the grapes by hand to extract the juice. Once we had enough juice, we strained the juice into a glass container that could hold a gallon of juice.

We marked the container at various levels so that we would know how much juice was extracted. We also put in approximately 50 ppm of potassium metabisulfite, (this is a very small amount: 1/4 teaspoon in 6 gallons of juice equals about 50 ppm, so 1/10th of this amount was used) to take care of any yeast or bacteria that could begin fermention and also to deactivate the polyphenol oxidase that could turn the juice brown. When all was said and done, we had a little over half a gallon of juice. About 10 milliliters of juice was removed before we moved the gallon jug into our temperature controlled fermentation chamber for the first cold settling to remove the gross soluble solids.
Several measurements were taken on the juice which gave the following starting information:

• Brix = 20
• pH = 3.25
• TA = 6.8 grams/Liter

Next step, fermentation.