Aux Harvest: Proof of Concept---Part 1

This is the last year that we think that we can make wine in our basement. Previously, I blogged about Accoutrement Preparation for Fermentation, where we purchased two more freezers to be adapted for low temperature fermentations as well as eight 15.5 gallon kegs.
We hope to have a larger harvest of Chenin Blanc this year, increasing from approximately 175 pounds to maybe 800 to 1000 pounds. Keeping that in mind, we had to change some of our procedures. In 2015, when we had our first very small crop, we stomped on our grapes in a cooler to extract the juice, and everyone had a lot of fun. This same procedure was repeated last year, 2016, but this year, we needed to think of another method to crush the nearly order of magnitude increase in grapes that we hope to harvest.
I still wanted to stomp the harvest so my husband accommodated my wishes. We went to our local fermentation supplier and bought a fermentation bin, usually used for red wine fermentation. This is a 50 gallon bin that my husband adapted with a bulk head fitting to accommodate a spigot.

Since we wanted to do a gravity flow of our juice into the glass carboy, our thought was to put the fermentation bin in our driveway and use a hose to bring the juice into our basement.

Everything looked fine, but we needed to test our new method. Fortunately, we have a small crop of Auxerrois that we can harvest to run a proof of concept test. Stay tuned to see if this worked.