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.