Chenin Blanc in Organza

This year our property got hit with a spring frost on May 18th and killed the growing shoots in the south half of the vineyard. In the early spring, we were uncertain as to what the vines would do, but they amazingly recovered and some of the shoots even had grapes, although it was very sparse. Since the grapes grew on secondary shoots, they were delayed in ripening and we thought that including these grapes in the harvest might skew the Brix, pH and titratable acids.
This was especially true for the Chenin Blanc. So, we decided to use this opportunity to see if we can make botrysized (aka noble rot) Chenin Blanc late harvest wine.
We have learned from previous attempts at making botrysized Chenin Blanc late harvest wine that the grapes survive best if they are bagged with organza bags, aka wedding bags. This is how we do it.

After the cleaning and bagging of the grapes are done, it looks like this:

I was interested in learning what we did in previous years and compiled this table:

Year	Harvest date	#Pounds	Volume	Brix	pH	TA
2019	November 19	50 lbs	4 gal	25	3.52	11.2 g/L
2020	December 11	5 lbs	375 mL	39	-	-
2021	December 15	20 lbs	1 gal	31.5	3.52	14.2 g/L

Although we did bag grapes in 2022, we have no statistics for that year because we failed to pull in the last harvest.
This year we are proactively bagging the grapes and hoping that Mother Nature will provide us with humid nights followed by dry, sunny days. Under those conditions, Botrytis infestation leads to dehydration of the grape, resulting in concentration of the sugars.
This year 750 grape bunches are pretty in organza!