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Friday, December 22, 2023

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 botrysized 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 botrysized 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!

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