The harvest moon rose the night before the first earnest picking of our Chenin Blanc harvest. Our friends, who are there with us doing the most boring jobs in the vineyard came at 6:30 a.m. and started unclipping the netting in preparation for the 7:30 crew. We picked 4 rows of Chenin Blanc that yielded 20 lugs of grapes.
The next step in our process was to bring the lugs to our home for crushing aka foot stomping! Here are photos of first time foot stompers. I say, "Happy foot stompers make great wine!"
Before getting into the stomping tub, one must put on food grade safe booties:
What I don't show is that we take all of the clusters and manually remove the bad grapes using tweezers. We were able to clean 6 lugs of grapes and combined it with 3-1/2 lugs that were cleaned and store in our neighbor's scallop freezer transport truck. The stomping of the grapes from these 9-1/2 lugs yielded 16 gallons of juice. All of this work was done by 11 a.m.
Here is a photo of our picking and stomping crew, minus two of our early net unclippers.
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