Vintage 2021: Cabernet Sauvignon and Cabernet Franc Harvest

Our last harvest of the year was on Sunday, October 24 when we harvested our Cabernet Sauvignon and Cabernet Franc. Our friends came once again to raise the netting and began harvesting around 9 a.m. The day was a cool but a beautiful one with sunshine and blue skies, a typical fall day in New England.
We had some new harvesters among our crew, including the cutest harvester, 6-1/2 year old Phoebe, who worked for 2 hours and said that she could have kept on going! That's the kind of crew we can really appreciate!
The harvest was a modest one, compared to what we had in our 2020 Cabernet Sauvignon and Cabernet Franc harvest. But the grapes were clean!
The harvested grapes all fit in their respective half-ton bins and were transported to our off vineyard facility to spend the night.

The grapes were transported to Jonathan Edwards Winery in the early afternoon where their destemmer made quick work of the harvest and the destemmed grapes went into the cleaned half-ton bins for cold maceration, to extract color.
It was very nice to know that all of our grapes were finally harvested and beginning their journey from juice to wine!

A Little Levity During the Chenin Blanc Harvest

Our first day of the Chenin Blanc harvest was on Sunday, October 17. Our friends come early to help us raise the netting and put down the lugs for harvest in advance of the many people who come to help us harvest.
At the end of this first day of harvesting Chenin Blanc, our friend came up to me and showed me his Apple tracking miles walked! Since he was one of the people raising the netting, he got a lot of miles that day.
I thought it was blog worthy. He really did a lot of walking that day and the Apple tracking map showed how long and straight our rows are and where the 10 rows of Chenin Blanc are.
We always talk about cross-training in the vineyard. My husband has a word for it: VitiFit!

Vintage 2021: Chenin Blanc Harvest - Part 2

Part 1 of the Chenin Blanc Harvest blogpost brought us up to Monday, October 18, when the grapes had been destemmed and crushed and the juice safely put into a tank for cold settling.
We had a few days of rest that we called PHADD (post-harvest adrenaline deficit disorder, pronounced "fad") where our batteries were pegging on empty and we needed a recharge.
We were back at Jonathan Edwards Winery on Thursday, October 21 to rack the cold settled juice into another tank in preparation for inoculation. My husband hooked up the hoses to the pump and then we cleaned the hoses, as instructed by Jon, making sure that there was no residual water in the hoses. We then hooked up the hoses to the tank with the juice and then to the receiving tank which was nearby. The racking took about 45 minutes for approximately 500 gallons of juice, after which we were able to open the manway to look inside.
Here is a photo of my husband getting the last of the clear juice from the bottom of the settling tank. After getting as much juice as we could, we believe that 15 gallons of yuck went down the drain.

Since the juice was at 54 degrees, we decided to let it warm up overnight and came back on Friday, October 22 to rehydrate our yeast, QA23 and temper it. It's difficult to get our heads around 480 grams of yeast, because we have been dealing with 5 gram packets for the longest time. Last year, I thought that a 2 gallon bucket would work for the rehydration and tempering and I ran into trouble right from the start!
For 480 grams of yeast, rehydration recommends 4.8 liters of water at 100 degrees F. The rehydration takes around 20 minutes and then tempering with juice takes another 20 minutes.

In the picture above, you can see the clarity of the Chenin Blanc juice. The middle photo is the tempered yeast, foaming close to the top of the 5 gallon bucket! Jay took it to the top of the tank to inoculate the Chenin Blanc for us so now we cross our fingers and wait for fermentation!

Vintage 2021: Chenin Blanc Harvest - Part 1

In trying to decide on a harvest day, and knowing that our grapes were almost a week behind the 2020 harvest date, we gathered representative samples from our Chenin Blanc clone 982 and FPS-1 on October 9 and 10. We tested the Brix, pH and TA and came up with these numbers:

Variety	Date of Testing	Weight	Volume of Juice	Brix	pH	TA
Chenin Blanc clone 982	October 9, 2021	973 g	530 mL	18.6	2.95	11.80 g/L
Chenin Blanc clone FPS-1	October 10, 2021	302 g	160 mL	19.3	3.05	9.5 g/L

Looking at those numbers above and looking at the week ahead, we decided to cross our fingers and hope that the nice weather during the coming week would bring the Brix levels up and the total acidity (TA) down. We were indeed fortunate since the temperatures during October 11-17 were in the mid to high 70's, sunny and warm.
We scheduled our harvest for Sunday, October 17 and Monday, October 18, taking in to account feedback from our crew that splitting the harvest of our major variety, Chenin Blanc, over two days would be a good thing.
Here is a photo of a handful of our crew busy at harvesting:

Another change in our operation was to pick up the filled lugs with the t-bins and deploy the lugs into the other rows so that our crew was never looking for an empty lug.

Initially, we decided to harvest 8 of the 17 rows of Chenin Blanc, but the very industrious crew said that "While you have us, use us! Strike while the iron is hot! Let's do a few more rows!" So we decided to harvest 2 more rows of Chenin Blanc and were able to do 10 rows instead of 8 by 2 p.m. we were on a roll and feeling good about how much was accomplished.
The grapes in the lugs were put into the t-bins and there was a total of 7 t-bins to take to Jonathan Edwards Winery. Without going into detail, there was a bit of a snafu with plan A so we deployed plan B with the help of our hunter who called his friend who had a dump trailer that could haul 3 t-bins at a time. Our hunter also had a tarp that could cover the t-bins. My husband put one of the t-bins in his truck so that at the end of the day, there were 6 t-bins on the ground safely covered with a tarp.

On Monday, we had a handful of dedicated people who were determined that we would get the harvest to the winery for pressing. The crew was able to harvest the remaining 7 rows of Chenin Blanc by 2 p.m. and we made the last pressing of the day at Jonathan Edwards Winery. Once at the winery, at the close of the day on Monday, we all breathe a small sigh of relief. Phew!
The following day, on October 18, we were able to get a sample of cold settled juice and got these numbers:

Variety	Date of Testing	Weight	Volume of Juice	Brix	pH	TA
Chenin Blanc total juice after cold settling	October 19, 2021	6200 pounds	496 gallons	20.4	3.17	14.6 g/L

The Brix was now at a good level and the pH and TA are something that we know how to deal with, so alls well that ends well! We want to thank everyone who came on Sunday and Monday to help us harvest our Chenin Blanc and the crew at Jonathan Edwards Winery who are always so kind to us!

Vecchia Modena and Sushi

A few days ago, our hunter brought us fresh caught yellow fin tuna. We had some white rice on hand so it was a natural to make sushi with it. The question of what to drink with the tuna sushi was settled when we had a half opened bottle of Vecchia Modena in the refrigerator with our special sparkling closure. I have blogged about Vecchia Modena, a sparkling lambrusco in a blogpost I wrote in April 2015. At that time, we really liked this frizzante style wine because it was a good value for the money. It still is! When we paired this wine with sushi, we had no idea how ideal this pairing was. It worked!

An aside: I sent my mother this photo of the sushi and she wrote back to me saying that although she is not an eater of raw fish, she knows that if we were to have that sushi in Hawaii, it would cost a small fortune!
Buoyed by the fact that Vecchia Modena and sushi was a great pairing, we recently tried it with twice wrapped rice paper dumplings and karaage. That was indeed a good pairing as well. Try Vecchia Modena the next time you have an Asian meal. You will like it!

Vintage 2021: Chardonnay Harvest---Part 2

In Vintage 2021: Chardonnay Harvest---Part 1, we left our Chardonnay in Jonathan Edward's winery. They were also in the midst of harvesting their grapes so we spent the morning rehydrating our yeast to inoculate the Auxerrois juice. That done, we waited to be able to get our Chardonnay weighed when the fork lift broke.
We agreed that we would proceed with pressing the Chardonnay and back calculate how much the harvest weighed. Lucky for us, Jonathan Edwards brought the press into the winery because it was raining outside. The contents of the lugs were pitched into the press and the press cycle began around 1:30.
As the juice came out of the press, my husband put it into three 75 gallon stainless steel barrels making sure to distribute the fractions equally into the three barrels, something that Jonathan Edwards taught us how to do. Since the three barrels were almost full we believe that we had approximately 210 gallons of Chardonnay juice, which we agreed must have weighed approximately 2625 pounds.

On October 6, we went to Jonathan Edwards Winery to remove the cold probes that we had in the two of the three 75 gallon barrels in order to rack the settled juice from the heavier lees and take down some information regarding the juice, something we should have done on Monday when we initially pressed the juice. In any case, here is the information from the three barrels:

We asked Jon if we could use one of his neutral oak barrels for part of our Chardonnay fermentation and he was kind enough (he always is!) to loan us one of his oak barrels. This was the first time that we set up the pump for transferring the juice. Yeay! The juice from the three stainless steel barrels were racked into one oak barrel and three stainless steel barrels in preparation for inoculation to kick off the fermentation.

The following day, on October 7, we went to rehydrate our yeast, CX9 and inoculated the juice at 9:45 a.m. We went to check on the fermentations on October 8 and 10 and both the Auxerrois and Chardonnay fermentations were bubbling along!

Vintage 2021: Chardonnay Harvest---Part 1

Five days after our Auxerrois harvest, on Sunday, October 3, we called on our friends to come and help us with the Chardonnay harvest.

For the first time, we did something correct in our Chardonnay and the fruit escaped being attacked by fungus and birds, although there was a bit of yellow jacket scourge.

Our vineyard spacing is 4 x 7, meaning that each vine is spaced four feet from the next vine and each row is 7 feet apart. In our case, each vine can hold 20+ grape bunches. The picture above shows that for the first time, our vines were carrying two bunches of fruit on some of the shoots!
The eight rows of Chardonnay was harvested by 1 p.m. by the industrious crew. They took a break for lunch and time for my husband to give a toast.

After lunch, a handful of our dedicated friends helped us with the stacking and shrink wrapping of the Chardonnay-laden lugs for transport to Jonathan Edwards Winery.

Once at the winery, Jonathan Edwards brought the palleted lugs into the winery for safekeeping.

When all was said and done, we transported two pallets with 35 full lugs, one pallet with 25 full lugs and one pallet with 15 full lugs and 4 partially full lugs for a total of 114 lugs of grapes. That brought the day of Chardonnay harvest to a close!

Vintage 2021: Auxerrois Harvest

Our first harvest of this vintage was the Auxerrois which we harvested on Tuesday, September 28, 2021.
Here is a reality check when a harvest date is scheduled: We were looking at our weather apps and saw that the rains were vacillating between coming on Tuesday, September 28 or Wednesday, September 29. When we scheduled harvest to be on Tuesday, the apps said that the rains would come on Wednesday. However, when harvest day came closer, the rains were definitely coming on Tuesday.
The dilemna: push harvest to another day, or harvest and pray. We chose to harvest and pray.
Our friends came at 7:30 a.m., and being the seasonsed harvesters that they are, began taking off the clothes pins and putting the netting on the trellis wire to expose the grapes. When the harvest crew arrived, they began harvesting the grapes immediately. The weather coorperated and amazingly, there were blue skies and the sun even managed to peak through the clouds although we did hear rumblings of thunder in the distance to the north of us.
The crew was able to get all of the 2 heavy rows of Auxerrois and the 3 not so heavy rows of Auxerrois harvested before noon. The lugs were packed and wrapped and put on the truck for transport to Jonathan Edwards Winery.

Our friends were able to sit down and partake in a bit of lunch before the skies opened up and the rains came down in sheets and buckets! My husband was on his way to Jonathan Edwards Winery with the Auxerrois when it poured rain on the grapes. Once he got there, the 2 pallets of grapes were safely tucked away in the winery for pressing on Monday.
On Monday, the grapes were weighed and the whole cluster pressing was started. When the pressing ended, we had approximately 130 gallons of juice.

Although we expected to get a larger harvest than we had last year, the grapes weighed approximately the same and we had approximately the same amount of juice. We took a sample of the juice home for testing and here are the numbers:

The cold probes were put into the stainless steel barrels for cold setting and the juice was allowed to settle until Saturday, October 2 when the juice was racked from the cold settling barrels into newly cleaned barrels to warm up in preparation for inoculation with yeast. The first racking to get rid of the heaviest soluble solids yielded at most 2 gallons from the 65 gallon barrels.

On Monday, October 4, we went to Jonathan Edwards Winery to rehydrate our yeast, QA23 for inoculation of the Auxerrois. At that time, we took a hydrometer reading of the juice that we would use for tempering the yeast and it read 18.5. My husband believes that the initial juice was around 19 ^oBrix, because the numbers I provided above were taken with a refractometer.
The juice was inoculated at 2:05 p.m.

Break in Blogging

Please excuse the lack of blog posts. We are in the midst of harvest. Will be blogging soon! Thank you for your patience!