Chardonnay Harvest 2019

Saturday, September 28, 2019 was our Chardonnay harvest. It was a beautiful day, perfect for harvest. We had a crew of 11 adults and 3 young adults helping us pick the grapes. We have 8 rows of Chardonnay, equally divided between clone 76 and clone 96. When I say "row", I should also mention that each row is nearly 800 feet long, so it is somewhat daunting, without the help of everyone involved. It took from 9 a.m. to 1 p.m. to pick approximately 291 pounds of Chardonnay.

Since this is a small harvest, we chose to stick to our previous routine of taking the grapes to our home to foot stomp in order to extract the juice. The first order of events was to feed our hard working harvesters with some lunch so that they had the energy to carry out the juice extraction step. Everyone lined up and had their turn at stomping the grapes and tasting the juice of their labor.

We also had help in the cellar, where the juice was being transported via gravity into two cleaned 15 gallons kegs. The wine lingo for people who work in the winery is "cellar rats". Our young adults aka cellar rats, who participated in harvest and stomping were now part of collecting the extracted juice that flowed from the stomping tub into the 15 gallons kegs. My husband was overseeing the cellar rats so no doubt they were being educated in the process that they were participating in.
Here are the smiling faces of our indefatigable cellar rats!

The numbers for the extracted juice looked like this:

Variety	Weight	Volume of Juice	Brix	pH	TA
Chardonnay	291 pounds	26 gallons	21.5	3.16	9.3 g/L

We couldn't have done this without the help of our fabulous crew who stayed with us until the last mash bag of Chardonnay was pressed and safely in the kegs! Thank you to all who participated!

Auxerrois Next Steps After Harvest

Our Auxerrois Harvest occurred on Monday, September 23, 2019. We took our grapes to a nearby winery to have the grapes pressed and the juice was put into a stainless steel barrel modified to be temperature controllable. The barrel was wrapped with a cooling snake and then with insulated for the initial cold settling step.

The next steps occurred yesterday, September 25, 2019. After cold settling, the juice was gravity racked from the one barrel into another. Our protocol is to take over some of the settled larger particulate matter to be the "food" for the growing yeast.

The winemaker guessed that we might have about 50 gallons of juice. When the transfer of the juice was made, what was left in the barrel was about 1/2 gallon of sluggy stuff which we decided to pitch. All in all, we thought that was a good recovery of juice.
The next steps were to take an aliquot of the juice with which to temper the yeast. For our yeast, we are using QA23. Since the estimate of juice was approximately 50 gallons, 50 grams of yeast was rehydrated in 500 mL of water at 110 degrees.
During the initial step when the yeast was being rehydrated, the winemaker took the Auxerrois juice and put it into a graduated cylinder to measure the sugar content with a hydrometer. We have never had enough juice to do this so it was a new experience!
The hydrometer, with the temperature corrected reading was 19.6 Brix. At the same time, the pH was measured and it was 3.26. The winemaker also took the titratable acid reading ant that turned out to be 7.35 g/L.
So the numbers for our 2019 Auxerrois juice are:

Variety	Weight	Volume of Juice	Brix	pH	TA
Auxerrois	636 pounds	50 gallons	19.6	3.26	7.35 g/L

The rehydrated, tempered yeast was put into the barrel at 2:32 p.m.! We took some of the juice home with us and also measured the level of sulfur dioxide in the initial fermentation and the number was 29 ppm, which is a nice reading to begin fermentation. Crossing our fingers.

Auxerrois Harvest 2019

Yesterday, September 23 was our first harvest of this year. We and a crew of 4 people harvested 2-1/2 rows of Auxerrois beginning at 8 and finishing at 11:30. We decided to harvest our Auxerrois because the last numbers that we took for the grapes on September 19, 2019 ended up looking like this:

Variety	# of Berries	Weight	Volume of Juice	Brix	pH	TA
Auxerrois	100	187 g	80 mL	18.8	3.19	11.5 g/L

We looked at the weather for the upcoming week and it looked as if we would be getting some rain on Tuesday so we decided to harvest on Monday, September 23. The call went out to our crew of harvesters, we only needed a few people since there weren't too many grapes to pick, but still we anticipated that we would get about 1/2 a ton (1000 pounds) of grapes.

The Auxerrois grape can become very golden in color. The clusters are on the loose side and each individual grape reminds me of a marble. Here is our crew, sans two people who had to leave us at 10:30. When all was said and done, we had 35 lugs of grapes.

Fortunately, 35 is easily divisible by 5 so when all was said and done, we had a stack of 5 x 7 lugs which we wrapped for transport to a local winery who will be helping us with the pressing and fermentation.

The first thing to do was to weigh the stack. It came in at 784 pounds but subtracting the weight of the lugs and the pallet, the weight of the grapes ended up being 636 pounds. Into the press, went the whole cluster grapes. Since we normally foot stomp our grapes, the wine maker guided us in selecting a mild pressing protocol which was press program 1 out of 9 different press programs. The juice came out looking like this:

Although my husband at this point said that he was just tired, I was very excited. Although the weight of the grapes was lower than we anticipated, the amount of extracted juice ended up being about 60 gallons. To give you some kind of perspective, last year's harvest of Auxerrois yielded 6 gallons of juice from which we made 1 case of 750 mL and 2 cases of 375 mL Auxerrois wine. So, 60 gallons is an order of magnitude more than we ever had before!

Our heartfelt thanks to the harvesters who came to help us yesterday!

Chenin Blanc Update

Here is a photo of one of our bunches of Chenin Blanc clone 982. You can see by the line post gradations, from notch to notch it is 4 inches so that means that this bunch is nearly 8 inches tall and has a small wing to the side. Chenin Blanc clone 982 produces bunches with very tight clusters which can be tricky for maintaining clean grapes. But the tight cluster means that the bunch can have significant weight and I would guestimate that the weight of this cluster is about 8 ounces.
In 2017, I took the measurements of one of the bunches of Chenin Blanc that I inadvertently cut and blogged about in Vital Statistics for our Chenin Blanc. In that photo, the bunch of Chenin Blanc is 6 inches x 4 inches and weighed 7.45 ounces.
Our Chenin Blanc is finally accumulating some sugars. The most recent test taken on September 14, 2017 showed the following:

Variety	# of Berries	Weight	Volume of Juice	Brix	pH	TA
Chenin Blanc	100	138 g	55 mL	14.6	2.62	16.8 g/L

We have a week of fine weather coming up so we hope that our Chenin Blanc continues on it's course of ripening.

2017 Emilio Moro Finca Resalso Tempranillo

We had this Tempranillo with Side Street Inn Pork Chops. This pork chop seems deceptively easy to make because it only has 4 ingredients, flour, cornstarch, pepper, and garlic salt. Dust the pork chop with garlic salt and pepper and before frying coat the pork chops with the flour and cornstarch mixture. Simple enough, right. I fried our pork chops using canola oil. The recipe calls for cottonseed oil. Is this the secret sauce? Because my pork chops came out okay but not remotely close to the real deal. Maybe the secret is that you have to be in Hawaii with the salty sea breeze and the no frills tables at the original Side Street Inn with the TV set on any game that's playing, to taste the unreproducible flavors of the Side Street Inn pork chops.
But this is a blog about wine, so more about the 2017 Finca Resalso Tempranillo. It was inky purple in color, with enough fruit and acid and very little tannins. The wine went very well with the pork chops with a side of grilled local corn and salad.
The best thing about this tempranillo is that it can be purchased for less than $20.00 and will definitely go under my tab called Wines Under $20.
This is a photo of the Side Street Inn pork chops from the Side Street Inn Website. In the local speak "Look soooo ono, no!"

Annual Cycle of Growth

I have been keeping a chart of our vineyard's annual cycle of growth since 2015. I read about it in Ed Hellman's online publication called Grapevine Structure and Function.¹ It is a good primer that I refer to time and again.
I took his annual cycle of growth chart and modified it so that I could include information on all of the years that we have had a harvest so that the information could be seen at one glance.
This is what it looks like with this year's information filled in so far.

What charting our annual cycle of growth does for us is to give us some guidelines as to when major events of the developing grape vine will occur. Right now, we are on track for harvesting our Auxerrois first and then our Chardonnay. Unless our Chenin Blanc catches up in the next few weeks, it looks like we may be harvesting our reds before our Chenin Blanc.
If you are interested in keeping your own log, here is a template:

References:
1. Ed Hellman, Grapevine Structure and Function.

Update on Cabernet Franc in Veraison

On Wednesday, September 4, I wrote about Véraison Status of Our Red Varieties. The photo of the Cabernet Franc was taken on Monday, September 2, 2019. On Thursday, September 5, when we were taking down the netting for the Cabernet Franc, we noticed that one row, clone 214 of the Cabernet Franc had all turned color.

Almost all of the grapes in that row of Cabernet Franc 214 had turned this color. We love the synchronicity of the color change. We have planted two different clones of Cabernet Franc in our vineyard as a test for which clone we might like to plant in our south field. So far, we noticed that clone 214 has an earlier budbreak than our other clone 327.
Here are the attributes of the 2 clones:^1,2

Clone Type	Attributes
ENTAV-INRA 214	Highest rating; characterized by raspberry and violet flavors in France; a high performance warm vintage clone with dark fruit flavors, tannin structure and less green, herbal flavors
ENTAV-INRA 327	Released in 1975; highest rating; like 326 produces structured and powerful wines; weaker of the two ENTAV clones, higher acid, brighter fruit, tends to be more herbaceous towards dill, muddy flavors

Here is an example of a cluster of Cabernet Franc 214. We like the loose architecture of the cluster. We must get to netting our Cabernet Franc very soon!

References:
1. Foundation Plant Services.
2. National Grape Registry

Véraison Status of Our Red Varieties

About 10 days ago, I blogged about Cabernet Sauvignon at Véraison. We were surprised that our Cabernet Sauvignon began turning color. We have Cabernet Sauvignon ENTAV clone 412.
Ten days later, this is how about 50% of the Cabernet Sauvignon look. We tested some berries for the Brix and they ranged any where from 11-17 Brix! You can be sure that we dropped our nets over these little beauties:

While we were looking at the Cabernet Sauvignon, we saw that the Cabernet Franc was now in véraison! It is interesting to us that véraison for the Cabernet Franc occurred after the Cabernet Sauvignon, but we'll see if the Cabernet Franc catches up to the Cabernet Sauvignon.

Heading Toward Harvest - Keep Those Grapes Clean!

Our major task as we head towards harvest is to keep our grapes as clean as humanly possible. One thing that is going to help us this year is that we changed all of our netting wire from fixed to moveable.
I blogged about why we went to a moveable netting wire in A Tale of Two Net Positions in June of this year.
When we had our netting on the fixed wire, while we could bring the netting around our fruit zone, we could not really close the netting around the trunk of our vines. Now with our moveable wire, we were able to bring the netting lower so that we can cinch our clothes pins around the trunk of the vines like so:

What does this do for us? In our previous netting position, the gap around the trunk of the vine was large enough so that birds, especially our Baltimore Orioles could get in and then peck away at the fruit. This is bad news. The open wound on the ripening grape is a call signal for yellow jackets followed by fruit flies. With the net close to the trunk the gap is closed and hopefully no birds can fly into the netting. Our hope is that the bird pecking will cease and the yellow jackets can more elsewhere for sustenance.
This is how our happy, netted grapes look: