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!