Vintage 2023: Auxerrois Harvest

Our first harvest of this season occurred yesterday, but first we had to weather the remnants of tropical storm Ophelia which decided to make an encore appearance on Friday and Saturday bring a drenching rain. Rain is the enemy of ripening grapes and we were crossing our fingers that the grapes were intact after the soaking. They were!
We have 5 rows of Auxerrois located on the west side of the vineyard. Two events in Vintage 2023 lead to a dramatic decrease in the number of grapes hanging on the vines. The first event was the Vintage 2023: February's Weird and Wacky Winter Weather, which saw temperatures hit a high of 70 degrees and then a low of -9 degrees in our vineyard. We did a bud count after the freeze and found that the Auxerrois seemed to have survived the freeze quite well. However, a frost on May 18th, Vintage 2023: May Oh Oh devastated the south end of our vineyard. Under these conditions, it's a little difficult to calculate how much fruit we would actually harvest, but we knew that it was significantly less than in past harvests.
We asked a small crew of people who have participated in many of our past harvests to come and help us on Sunday. The crew knew exactly what to do. We first unbuttoned the nets by taking off the clothes pins and then raised the nets using the clothes pins. The nets were raised on all 5 rows of Auxerrois in an hour and when the rest of the crew came at 9, the strategy was to harvest two rows of grapes by driving our tractor with the trailor attached and having our friends pick the grapes on both sides of the alley.

The other half of our crew took a small cart and empty lugs and harvested the next two rows. The last row of Auxerrois took approximately 10 minutes or so because the vines there are still young and not mature enough to hang grapes. The entire harvest was done around 10:20!
There was a brief break for snacking and then our harvesters were all game to help us christen our new press at our recently federally bonded industrial facility which is fortunately, only a short drive from our vineyard.
Knowing that we would be having a very small harvest, we could not bring it to the Jonathan Edward Winery for processing as we had done in the past 4 years. Our solution was to purchase a Lancman VSPIX 250 from Oesco who delivered it to us on September 20th.

Christening the Lancman involved cleaning the bladder with water and then cleaning the stainless steel cage with a mild detergent, we used saniclean. The cage was washed with distilled water and the bladder was tested before reassembly.

The manual says that a garden hose can be used to fill the bladder. In our case, testing the bladder was a bit more involved because we don't really have access to running water. (We are hoping to address this situation soon.) However, in a pinch, my husband used our IBC tank and the pump that he has which runs off the truck's battery to fill the bladder.
Once this test was done to see if the bladder will inflate and the pressure gauge was working, we were in business to fill the press!
We like to process our grapes as whole clusters. Once again, relying on instructions in the manual, which said to squeeze the grapes before putting it in the press, that is what our friends did:

Once the press was filled, the bladder was inflated and the juice slowly made it's appearance!

The last thing we did was to clean the press, lugs, the outdoor space, and bring the pressed grape remains to the compost pile. It was a full day and we thank our friends for helping us with the harvest and the first pressing in our new facility!