On Saturday, our crew, Mary and Barry plus one, Urs, came to harvest the Chardonnay. We are still trying to fine tune our harvest parameters, so we began again at 7 a.m. putting the netting up off the Chardonnay and harvesting into our lugs. This part of the harvest goes quickly. With 5 people we were done in 45 minutes. In the end, we had 6 lugs worth of fruit. The photo below was taken in mid-picking.
For the Chardonnay harvest, we had a problem with yellow jackets that made holes in the grapes and made mummies out of the berries. Mary and I were the designated cleaners and we thought that this fruit was better off than the Auxerrois we harvested on Thursday, September 21. We filled a mash bag to it's limit and this time, Urs was the stomper. Stomping began around 8:30. Every once in a while, Barry would spritz the mash bag with a very dilute solution of potassium metabisulfite, (one teaspoon of potassium metabisulfite in one gallon of water).
While Urs was stomping, Mary and I were cleaning the second bolus of Chardonnay. The cleaning is really the rate limiting step. Due to the cleaner fruit, one more person to help, and better preparation, we were able to finish the process at 9:45, which is 3-1/5 hours faster than our first trial with the Auxerrois.
The 6 lugs of fruit gave us around 7 gallons of juice. In the end, the Chardonnay juice was much greener than the Auxerrois juice due to the spritzing of the potassium metabisulfite during juicing, indicating that there was less oxidation going on.
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