Chardonnay 2018 Harvest

We harvested our small crop of Chardonnay this past Sunday, on September 30 with a group of stalwart friends who came to the vineyard at 8 a.m. All 8 rows of Chardonnay vines were culled for the grapes that made it to harvest. (I will tell this sad story in another blog post). The grapes fit into 6 lugs and it took us until 9:45 a.m. to harvest this crop.

We went home and did our typical second step which is to use a tweezer to remove the bad grapes from the good and to put the cleaned cluster into a clean lug. This took us from 10 a.m. to 1 p.m. It's kind of an onerous task, but our friends are obliging and we get a chance to while away the time by talking stories. For example: who was the only President to have a Ph.D? (Answer: Woodrow Wilson).
So, from 6 harvested lugs, we ended up with 5 cleaned lugs. From past experience, we know that 1 clean lug of grapes is approximately 20 pounds so we had about 100 pounds of grapes. Our friend, who helped us to harvest volunteered his children and their friends who came for the weekend to help us with the next step, stomping the grapes.
Here is a photo of the Future Winemakers of America.

The procedure to prepare for stomping is to shed shoes and put on food safe booties. Once this is done, it is into the fermenting tub to stomp on the grapes. Each person who stomped got to taste the resultant juice.

When all the stomping was done, we had nearly a full 23 liter glass carboy (about 6 gallons). This carboy went into the cooler to chill overnight.
We think the Future Winemakers of American had a good time and we hope that this event is something that they will remember. We thank our friends who came to help!
Here are the numbers for the Chardonnay:

	Brix	pH	Titratable Acids (TA g/L)
Chardonnay	17	3.35	7.8