Harvesting Organza Wedding Bags

We harvested about 1/3rd of our organza wedding bags on Saturday morning from 7-9:30. For information on how we got there, please read the blogpost: Bird Damage and Wedding Bags in the Vineyard.
The short story is that we were too late to order the type of netting that we wanted and went to plan B---wedding bags.
We simply cut the peduncle, (that is the attachment point of the grape cluster to the shoot) bags and all. When we got home, we had the task of taking the grape clusters out of the bags. We harvested this lot because we noticed that some of the grapes were turning into raisins and some of the clusters Brix readings were headed north of 24 ^oBrix. We counted approximately 300 clusters that were so afflicted and a few others so that we could have a decent amount of volume for fermenting. The raisining possibly can be attributed to the fact that it has been a really dry year in Connecticut, and the United States Drought Monitor Website shows our region of Connecticut to be in the severe drought zone.

Not all of our grape clusters showed this type of raisining, (ironically, kind of an early, late harvest flavor profile). We have about 2/3rds more to harvest. The clusters that constitute this first harvest were already at 20 ^oBrix on September 6th.
We weighed the clusters and determined that we had about 42 pounds of fruit. We juiced the fruit following the protocol we used in 2015, using the same Igloo cooler.
The information on the juice is:

• Brix = 20
• pH = 3.0

We did attempt to take a reading of the titratable acids (TA) with our Vinmetrica SC-300 Pro, but the reagents had expired. (Who knew that 0.13N sodium hydroxide (NaOH) expires!)
Note: Order new reagents every year.
New reagents are on order and we should receive them by Wednesday.
When all was said and done, we had about 4 gallons of juice which we put into our fermentation chamber to settle out the gross suspended soluble solids.
This first harvest is slightly less volume that the total harvest that we had last year (350 clusters, 65 pounds, 5 gallons yielding twenty-four 750 mL bottles). This was a good prelude and practice for the "real" harvest soon to come.