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!