Last Harvest of 2021

On November 24, I wrote a blogpost about The Story of Our Wedding Bag Grapes. We have been patiently waiting and checking on the wedding bags for the right moment to harvest the crop. We havested the approximately 500 wedding bags on December 15. The entire harvest fit into three lugs! After we came home, the grapes in the wedding bags were consolidated. From 500 bags, we ended up with 24 bags of botrytis infected grapes.

In order to approximate the weight of the harvest, we took the weight of 4 consolidated wedding bags and averaged the weight. We had approximately 20 pounds of grapes. Our next task was to set up the micro-basket press that my husband purchased specifically for this harvest. Yes, it is as tiny as it looks in the picture!

We put in a few wedding bags at a time and squeezed the juice. It is really like getting liquid from a rock! It didn't take more than hour to press the wedding bags. In the end, all 24 bags fit into the micro-press. We got aapproximately a gallon of juice out of the pressing.

The beginning parameters for this botrytized Chenin are:

Variety	Weight	Volume of Juice	Brix	pH	TA
Botrytized Chenin Blanc	20 pounds	1 gallon	31.5	3.52	14.2 g/L

On December 18, we rehydrated our yeast of choice, QA23. We weighed out 1 gram of yeast, rehydrated it in 10 mL of spring water at 96 ^oF for 10 minutes. After the yeast was rehydrated, we tempered the yeast with 10 mL of the juice, added in 3 mL aliquots. We inoculated the juice at 11 a.m.

Now its a matter of waiting!