Vintage 2023: Harvesting Cabernet Sauvignon, Cabernet Franc and Barbera

As grape farmers, we are always looking at the weather. This time it was to decide when to harvest our red varieties so that it could achieve the best level of ripeness that this season was going to give us. We wanted to take advantage of the warm days coming up and avoid the rain that was in the forecast so it happened that our penultimate harvest of this season occurred on Tuesday, October 31.
A great group of 15 or so of our friends came to help us on a week day. Since there were 6 rows of red grapes with two rows of each variety, we harvested two rows at a time so as not to confuse the Cabernet Sauvignon with the Cabernet Franc.

We began at 9:30 and finished up at 11! By that time, the sun had come out and it was a beautiful day. Our friends got together to have a bite to eat which included a hearty Cowboy bean soup provided by our friend, Laurie.

After lunch, Curt graciously offered to help us take one of the half ton bins to Jonathan Edwards so that it could be weighed and destemmed.

Zak and Jon helped us with the destemming of the grapes. During part of the destemming, my husband noticed the abundance of rachis and jacks falling into the destemmed grapes. Although he asked if there was a speed control on the destemmer, we finished the destemming without any adjustments to the machine. Curt and my husband brought the two half ton bins of destemmed Cabernet Sauvignon and Cabernet Franc back to our industrial site where they sat overnight.

The following morning, we did our best to remove the jacks and rachis from the two bins. We calculated the amount of juice that we would get from the weight of the grapes and the theoretical yield would be 23 gallons of Cabernet Franc and 30 gallons of Cabernet Sauvignon. This amount of juice was very reminiscent of our 2019 harvest and when we referred to the blogpost Progress Report on Our Cabernet Franc and Cabernet Sauvignon we found that the grapes and juice were fermented in a 50 gallon plastic container. My husband, aka Procurement found that Misto Grapes carried those containers, however, when he called, the containers were in high demand and sold out for the season. We went to Plan B, which was to put the grapes and juice into 44 gallon plastic Brute containers. We scooped the Cab Franc into the container first and in the process found a bolt that must have come off from the destemmer at Jon's. We brought it back and learned that Jon also thought that the destemmer was running too fast, so hopefully he made the adjustment for his harvest.
Back at the industrial space, our Cabernet Sauvignon and Cabernet Franc were in the 44-gallon containers continuing to extract out color from the skins. Next up, fermentation!