Vintage 2018: Auxerrois and Chardonnay Harvest

All was well with our grapes at the end of August. The summer warmth accelerated sugar import to the grapes and our white varieties were looking good. I wrote a blog about how things stood: Vintage 2018: End of Summer.
It looked as if the Cabernet Sauvignon and the Chenin Blanc were at a similar sugar level. We still had all of September for ripening and some of October as well.

Varietal	Brix on August 25, 2018	Brix at Harvest	Harvest Date
Auxerrois	13	18	September 17, 2018
Chardonnay	13	17	September 30, 2018

The Auxerrois, as is typical of that variety was the first we harvested, because we saw that we would be in for rain. The next grape we harvested was Chardonnay.
We fermented our Auxerrois with QA23, the yeast that we typically use for our Chenin Blanc, inoculating the must on September 21, 2018. The fermentation went rather quickly and by September 30, it appeared that the fermentation was over. We saw nothing to gain with leaving the Auxerrois sitting on lees, so on October 11, we bottled 1 case of 750 mL and 2 cases of 375 mL wine in hock style bottles, used in the Alsace.
With the Brix reading being so low for the Chardonnay, we decided to turn this into a Pétillant Naturel, or Pét-Nat, for short. We had a successful trial balloon last year when my husband decided to turn a small amount of our Chenin Blanc into a Pét-Nat so this year, I was all in on the Pét-Nat band wagon!

Stay tuned for the fate of the Chenin Blanc and our red varietals I'll be writing about in future blogposts!