2020 Chardonnay Harvest

Exactly one week after the Auxerrois harvest, we harvested the Chardonnay on September 24, 2020. Our Chardonnay had seen a lot of bird pecking as well as some raccoon damage. We tried to clean the grapes before putting the netting over the grapes. Despite our efforts to protect the grapes, they were in less than optimum condition and we thought that we might have 600 pounds of Chardonnay when all was said and done.
Our small but hard working crew came and made quick work of harvesting the 4 rows of netted grapes. We had another 4 rows of unnetted grapes, that one of our friends stayed to help us clean. When all was said and done, we had 51 lugs distributed 26/25 on two pallets. We brought the pallets to Jonathan Edwards Winery early the following day.

We were surprised that we got almost twice the number of pounds than we were expecting. The harvested grapes looked like this:

The whole cluster grapes went into the press and the gentlest of cycles was used to extract the juice.

When the press cycle was done, we had one full stainless steel barrel of juice. There was about 5 gallons of the tail end of the pressing still left in the press pan and that juice went into the third barrel of the Auxerrois which contained the moderate lees.
The parameters for this starting juice was:

Variety	Volume of Juice	Brix	pH	TA
Chardonnay	75 gallons	23.4	3.0	10 g/L

On Monday, September 28, 2020 my husband and I went to the Jonathan Edwards Winery to rack the cold settled juice. Jonathan Edwards cleaned two barrels for us to transfer the juice into.

After racking the juice, we took 80 grams of CX9 yeast and rehydrated it in 800 mL water at 95 degree F for 20 minutes, then added Chardonnay juice in two 500 mL aliquots. The barrels were inoculated with the CX9 yeast at 4:20 p.m.