Auxerrois 2018 Harvest

Rain is the enemy of ripening grapes. We already had 2 rain events the previous week, on Monday, September 10th that brought us 1-inch of rain and on Wednesday, September 12th that gave us another 2-inches of rain. We are not complaining since we know that our grape growing neighbors in the Mid-Atlantic states had to make a decision to harvest due to Hurricane Florence. While we were only going to get the after effects of Hurricane Florence, here in Connecticut, we did have advance notice that we would get another deluge of rain on Tuesday, September 18th. Knowing this, we harvested our small crop of Auxerrois on Monday, September 17. My husband and I went to the vineyard on Monday at 7:30 and harvested our small crop in 2 hours. It took 9 lugs to hold the entire crop. We went home and began to clean the grapes, something that we have done since 2015.

Nine lugs yielded 6 lugs of cleaned grapes and the approximate weight of the grapes was 132 pounds. We departed a little from our normal MO of putting the grapes in mash bags to start. Now it was stomping time. For this step, we put on food grade booties that we purchased from Uline. We soon realized that one of the reasons that we put the grapes into the mash bags is to hold back the gross pulp, skins and seeds. So, we went back to the tried-and-true and put the grapes into the mash bags to stomp the grapes.
This is always the fun part! While we stomp, we usually spritz the grape mash bag and juice with a 50 ppm solution of potassium metabisulfite to try to keep the juice from oxidizing too much. The result of our stomping was about 6 to 7 gallons of Auxerrois juice in two glass carboys.

We took the parameters for the juice in the two glass carboys and then put in 50 ppm of potassium metabisulfite into each carboy. The carboys then went into the fermentation chamber to cold settle. We called the carboy that held the larger amount of juice, Aux-1 and the other carboy, Aux-2. Here is what we found for the numbers:

Auxerrois	Brix	pH	Titratable Acids (TA g/L)
Aux-1	17	3.34	5.7
Aux-2	17	3.36	5.4

we tasted the last of the juice that was left in the bin that couldn't be siphoned into the carboy. It was delicious! Next steps will be documented in a future blog.