Harvest 2016

The weather report for this week was not a good one if harvest time is on the horizon. Decisions have to be made and yesterday(actually, Monday morning), we decided that we could not wait to harvest our small crop of Chenin blanc with the upcoming rains on Tuesday morning, followed by more rain in the forecast for Thursday, Friday, Saturday and Sunday. While we knew that things could change, we couldn't disregard the 1/2-1 inch of rain expected Monday night into Tuesday, so the decision was made to harvest the crop. We emailed our friends in the morning and they were available to come and help pick the wedding bags, so the crew was assembled and the harvest time was set at 1 p.m. It was a beautiful day with temperatures in the 60's all day long. The only complication was that my husband was blowing out the irrigation lines in preparation for winter.
The harvest itself took only 45 minutes and 7 yellow lugs full of wedding bags were harvested.

We brought the harvest home and the first thing was to supply the crew with sustenance for the difficult task of debagging to follow. All hands were busy untying the bags and taking out the booty.

The full lugs were weighed: 118.5 pounds
The next "task" was to juice the grapes. We returned to the method we used last year in which we used our Igloo cooler and foot protection (plastic bags) to stomp our grapes. Barry took it up a notch when he located the sound track for Zorba the Greek. Great fun was had by all!