Accoutrement Preparation for Fermentation

Fall like temperatures have arrived in the Northeast so it is really nice to go to the vineyard and work. We have a few more weeks before we will be harvesting, but until then, it is really up to Mother Nature to provide the optimum weather for the end game. We believe that this year, we will be harvesting close to 1000 pounds of Chenin Blanc, which put us in a bit of a quandary. My husband thought long and hard about renting an outdoor cooler, but that was not in the realm of feasibility. We finally decided that for one more year, we could clean our basement to accommodate two more chest freezers that we would modify to hold our kegs for a controlled, low temperature fermentation.
The two freezer chests came yesterday.

What's going into those freezers, you ask. We have eight half-kegs which will hold 15.5 gallons of liquid. The half-kegs came today. We think (hope) that we will have 80 gallons of juice to ferment. We will use 6 of those half-kegs for fermentation and use 2 for racking.