Vintage 2023: Recap of This Vintage

Phew! is all that I can say about this year. It began with a frost event in the early morning hours on February 4. At 1:30 a.m. the temperature went to -5 ^oF and steadily declined until it reached a low temperature of -9.5 ^oF at 7:00 a.m.! This event killed many of our primary buds in the vineyard. But the second blow came on May 18 when there was a frost event that killed most of the growing shoots in the south end of our vineyard.
This was our first experience with a frost event in mid-May and we were unsure how to handle the growing shoots which were now frost bitten. Fortunately, we decided not to touch the south end of the vineyard and focussed our attention on the north end of the vineyard that appeared to have survived. The north end required disbudding and shoot removal which we did for the rest of May. We then turned our attention to the south end to remove the dead shoots. This took about one week. There were a few flower buds here and there on the south end of the vineyard, but the majority of the flowers were at the north end of the vineyard. In June and July the shoots had their grand growth phase and it surprised us that even though the shoots came from what was probably secondary and some tertiary buds, they were quite vigorous! We attributed the vigor to the lack of fruit that would have kept the shoot's vigor in check.
For the rest of the summer, we were busy removing excess shoots, shoot tucking, and hedging. Fortunately, we had help from our 14 year old granddaughter who learned how to drive our John Deere lawn mower adapted to pull a cart into which we put the countless trimmings for her to take to the compost pile. Our friends and their families also came to help us.
Although we knew that our harvest would be small, we took care of the vineyard and whatever fruit was there to nurture. We did have a modest amount of fruit for each of the varieties. Jonathan Edwards and his people helped us with the pressing of the Chenin Blanc and the destemming of our red varieties. The beauty of having a manageable amount of juice was that we were able to ferment all of the harvest in our industrial facility!
2023 marks the 10th year since we first planted our vineyard and although in some ways the time has flown by, in other ways, it does take 10 years to comply with the Federal, State and local laws in order to be able to sell wine.
You can see all of the vintage notes which appears under the tab here: Vintage Notes
Wishing you all a very Prosperous and Happy New Year!

2023 Harvest Party

The second Sunday in December is when we hold our annual harvest party. We have been doing this in our industrial space since 2021.
Here is a look back at the previous harvest parties:
2021 Harvest Party
2022 Harvest Party
This is a time for us to thank all of the people who helped us bring in the various varieties of grapes that we harvest and a time for everyone to mingle. We had close to 40 people attend the harvest party, including our son and daughter-in-law and their two children.
The theme of the food this year was Greek! Our friend Jenny procured for us real Greek feta, grape leaves and sour cherry to make the spoon sweet dessert. Our son made hummus and eggplant spread (melitzanosalata) from scratch and it was very well received! My husband and I split the rest of the cooking duties.

To go with the Greek theme, my husband procured some Greek wines.

Once again, there was the traditional annual drawing of prizes. We thought our nearly 7 year old grandson might want to help with this, but he demurred. His sister, however was only too willing to lend us a hand and stepped up to the task of drawing the three lucky winners.
We hope that everyone had a good time and we want to thank all of our friends who came to help us with our 2023 harvest!

Progress of the Botrytized Chenin Blanc

On December 22, I blogged about Vintage 2023: Last Harvest of This Year and some details of the harvest, pressing and cold settling. In today's blog I will continue with the inoculation and fermentation of the botrysized Chenin Blanc.
On December 3, when we went to the winery, we saw that the juice had settled quite nicely and the heavy sediment was clean enough that we did not feel the need to rack the juice so we proceeded with the yeast hydraton, tempering and inoculation.
We estimated that we had 4 gallons of juice, so we rehydrated 4 grams of QA23 yeast in 50 mL of spring water at 100 F^o, and every 10 minutes added 15 mL of the botrysized Chenin Blanc juice. Inoculation of the rehydrated and tempered yeast occurred on December 3 at 12:15 pm.
When we came back to the winery on December 4, we saw that the fermentation had begun evidenced by the foam on the surface of the juice. On December 6, the juice was becoming more turbid, more foam was appearing and the bubbler was showing the escape of carbon dioxide.

On December 6, we took videos of the fermentation which was really humming along at this time.

By December 19, the fermentation seemed to be essentially over but there was still a little activity indicated by the bubbler. What was interesting was the color change from the start of fermentation. The December 19 photo shows that the juice was becoming a little clearer and had a lemon yellow color.
The glass carboy was a little deceptive as it appears that the sediment was about a third of the way up from the bottom, but looking more closely, the actual sediment was at the very bottom of the carboy.
Next steps include testing the evolving wine and continuing to monitor the fermentation.

Vintage 2023: Last Harvest of This Year

I took a long hiatus from blogging. Today is the first day of winter. Our last harvest of the year occurred on December 1, a Friday before an impending storm on Saturday. It's been like this since the end of summer.
We called on our friends, Mary and Barry to help us harvest 9 half rows of wedding bagged Chenin Blanc grapes. We convened at 9 am, raised the nets and began harvesting. Raising the nets took the better part of the time, we were done harvesting the approximately 750 bags by 10:30. Our entire bounty fit into 11 yellow lugs.

We then took the harvested grapes to our industrial space and began the job of unbagging 750 wedding bags of their botrytized contents.

We were able to fill 4 lugs with the grapes and estimated their weight to be approximately 80 pounds. Typically, 80 pounds of grapes will yield 6.4 gallons of juice so the botrytized fruit gave us 0.625 of the typical yield. (So, next year, if we were to bag half of a row of Chenin Blanc grapes, estimating a yield of 500 pounds, instead of the typical 40 gallons of juice, we would get approximately 25 gallons of juice.)
After all of the grapes were removed from the wedding bags, they were put into mash bags and then put into the press that Barry brought over.

The juice was ferried to the 5 gallon carboy using plastic pitchers. We tried not to waste even a drop of liquid gold. The process was a slow one because it takes a lot of ratcheting to squeeze juice from almost raisins. However, we were done by noon! The carboy was then put into a bin and then ice was packed around it to bring the temperature of the juice down to 30+ degrees. This ensures that any particles that makes the juice dark settles out. In the pictures below, the left shows the juice after pressing and the right shows the juice after cold settling for 48 hours.

The juice had achieved a golden yellow color and we were ready for the next steps. Stay tuned to read what we did with the botrysized juice!

Luxury Condo Addition in the Vineyard

We are members of the National Resources Conservation Service (NRCS) and since 2022 have participated in the Conservation Stewardship Program. As part of this program we were asked to put up bat houses in our vineyard in 2023. My husband sourced the parts and purchased two bat houses in April. He also had a plan for the construction of the bat houses. Time passed and the next opportunity he had to actually put his plan to practice was in September, a few weeks before the NRCS would come to inspect the bat houses.
If you are familiar with vineyard work, September is when we ramp up for harvest, so it was a busy time for us. My husband built a scaffold for the bat houses. He began digging a hole for the bat house with a post hole digger and he soon realized that this was a task for his backhoe. Unfortunately, the backhoe was enveloped in invasives which he had to manually remove with loppers. Having done that, he attached it to the tractor and crossed his fingers that the hydraulics were all working. Yes! Back to the bat house. The backhoe did the trick and in a few days huge boulders were removed from the hole and it was time to put the bat house up.
The first thing was to fix the post into the ground with concrete. This was done on day 1 and allowed to cure for 2 days. The next step involved our friend Barry. My husband designed the scaffold so that it could pivot from an upright position to a position near the ground to allow for easy access to cleaning. The scaffold that the bat houses were on was remarkably heavy. Barry suggested using the tractor and bucket.

Barry's extensive experience with ESPN cameras in high places came in handy as he balanced the bat houses on the tractor bucket and had ropes to steady the scaffold as the bucket lifted it to a more and more upright position. My job was to bang in the bolt and secure it with the nut so that once the scaffold was upright it wouldn't fall over.

Amazingly, this operation didn't take too long and the bat luxury condominum was ready for inspection.
A few days later, Courtney, Annabelle and Mike from the NRCS came to inspect the bat houses and said that it was the best constructed bat house that they had ever seen!
Now all we need are the occupants!