We harvested our first crop of Barbera last Wednesday when there was a break in the rain. The harvest took place in between the punchdowns of our Cabs that we were doing at the Jonathan Edwards Winery, three times a day. My husband and I did the harvest by ourselves because it was "just" one row of Barbera.
We managed to harvest 8 lugs worth of Barbera and then headed to the Jonathan Edwards Winery to do the last punchdown of the day. We shared a cluster of the Barbera with Jonathan Edwards. The Barbera had a lot of sugar but the acids were also making their presence known.
Since we don't have a destemmer and the amount of grapes was too little to ask Jonathan Edwards if we could use his destemmer, I had the bright idea that we could destem the grapes by ourselves. What does that mean? That means to pick off each grape from it's rachis by hand. Usually my husband pooh-poohs my ideas but this time he agreed! We spent a little of Wednesday and much of Thursday and Friday hand destemming our Barbera. After we destemmed 2-1/2 lugs of Barbera which filled a 5 gallon plastic container, we realized that our initial fermentation container was too small so we went to Home Depot to get a food grade 32 gallon plastic trash bin.
The trash bin was the perfect container for the 8 lugs worth of grapes that we believe amounted to around 110 pounds. At the moment, it is in the process of cold maceration, extracting the anthocyanins, the red color from the skins. We did take some numbers for this juice and it was:
| Variety |
Weight |
Volume
of Juice |
Brix |
pH |
TA |
| Barbera |
110 pounds |
9 gallons |
23.4 |
3.05 |
12.0 g/L |
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