Harvesting the Chenin Blanc

On Sunday, October 20, our friends gathered to help us harvest the first 8 rows of Chenin Blanc. During the days leading up to the harvest, my husband and I meticulously dropped the green bunches of grapes that didn't past the Brix text. My husband was sampling them while I was using the hand held refractometer.
On Sunday, we harvested 90 lugs of grapes in 3 hours! The first hour, from 8-9 our friends came to help us lift the nets in the 8 rows. There was a short break at 9 and we gathered into two groups working from the south end to the north end in rows 1 to 4. We paired up where one person held the lug and the other person cut the grapes. We had two runners in each of the alleys watching for full lugs and swapping them out with empty lugs. My husband and two people were in the alley between the rows that people were working in. They would retrieve the full lugs from the runners and ensure that the lugs were full and stacked them. In this way, we were able to do 4 rows in 1 hour!

Once the group reached the north end, we shifted over to rows 5-8 and did the same process harvesting from the north end to the south end. When we were done, it was 11 a.m.! It was a gorgeous day and people stayed for lunch. My husband brought out a tasting of Chenin Blanc 2019 and 2020 so that people could taste the wine that was made from the grapes they harvested.
The next day, Monday, October 21, we went to Stonington Vineyards to take the 90 lugs of grapes for pressing. Mike McAndrew's crew, Jim and Dakota helped us load the press and by 8:30, the pressing was underway!
We took a sample of the juice and recorded the Brix, pH and TA.
I began writing this blogpost last week but a week has already gone by and another Chenin Blanc harvest occured on Sunday, October 27. It was another perfect morning with temperatures in the mid-50s and sunny. This time, our friends exceeded even last weeks' harvest record, picking 8-1/2 rows of Chenin Blanc by 10:35! I think we are on to something with this method! We celebrated the last big harvest with our friends. Brunch was served and sticking to tradition, we provided a sparkling wine to mark the occasion!
On Monday, October 28, we took the grapes to Stonington Vineyard and had it pressed. The pressing was done by 10:30 and we took the juice back to our industrial space at Taugwonk.
These are the numbers for the two Chenin Blanc harvests with a comparison to the original numbers taken on October 6.

Variety	Weight	Volume of Juice	Brix	pH	TA
Chenin Blanc-statistical sampling	NA	NA	17.0	3.0	NA
Chenin Blanc- Rows 1 to 8	1980 lbs	160 gallons	20.5	3.15	9.5 g/L
Chenin Blanc- Rows 9 to 17	1875 lbs	150 gallons	21.5	3.18	9.8 g/L

We hope people enjoyed being part of the harvest! We want to thank all of our friends who came to help! And a huge thank you to Mike, Jim and Dakota!

Dropping Unripe Chenin Blanc

We are seeing some strange behavior from our grape varieties this year. I wrote about the Mystery in the Vineyard where our Chardonnay, Cabernet Sauvignon, Cabernet Franc and Barbera leaves fell off. There is something else that we are noticing now that our Chenin Blanc harvest is coming up this Sunday, October 20 and the following Sunday, October 27.
On October 6, we picked a representative sample of Chenin Blanc from the 17 rows that we have. We split the sampling into the two clones, 982 and FPS-1. Both clones came in with numbers that were very low: 17 Brix and pH of 3.0. We decided then that we needed to drop some of the green berries in the rows. We began last week and saw many grape clusters that had brown peduncles and had shriveled and died on the vine. Along with those grapes, we saw many green bunches where the Brix ranged from 8-15 Brix. There were other grapes that were ripening normally and we think that in our sampling, we got a mixture of these green and ripe berries giving us an average Brix of 17.

The good news is that there is very little botrytis rot. We hope to finish dropping the unripe grapes by the time harvest approaches. After pressing, I will report the Brix, pH and TA. Stay tuned!

Winery Work is 90% Cleaning!

One thing that we learned at Jonathan Edwards when we made our wine there was that 90% of winery work is cleaning! We are learning that quickly as we try to set up our own process for making wine and racking wine.
In order to ferment the 2024 Auxerrois and Chardonnay juice that we brought back from being pressed at Stonington Vineyards, we had to first clean some barrels for the Chardonnay and then move the 2023 Chenin Blanc finished wine from the tank into barrels and kegs to free up the tank for the 2024 Auxerrois.
The steps involved:

• Making up the cleaning solutions
• Finding and cleaning the barrels and kegs that we thought the wine would go into
• Setting up the pump and the transfer lines
• Cleaning the barrels, kegs and lines

The above process is complicated in our space because we don't have drains in the floor. My husband devised a method by which we could work around this situation by contacting our Porta-Potty company who said that they would come to pump out the waste matter from an IBC tank that we would fill.
On October 2, we tested our process by cleaning two stainless steel barrels and then transferring our Chardonnay into the cleaned barrels. That took the better part of the afternoon into the early evening!
The following day, the Chardonnay was inoculated and the fermentation was started. Confident in our method, we tackled the 160-gallon tank that we had our 2023 Chenin Blanc in. We first cleaned a barrel and several kegs and the transfer from the tank to the barrel and kegs went smoothly.
Next came the task of cleaning the tank. One complication was that although we put in on-demand pressurized hot water, (please see our blogpost: Industrail Space Upgrade), we did not have any hot water!
We carried on and after the wine transfer, this is what the inside of the tank looked like. My husband washed it out with cold water and since we had a tea kettle, we made numerous pots of boiling water. You can see the progress in these photos:

The entire process of cleaning the tank took one hour! We think that the tank could have been cleaned in at least half the time if we had running hot pressurized water. However, we were really happy with the result. Clean tank!

Pressing Our Harvest at Stonington Vineyards

This year, we pressed our harvest at Stonington Vineyards. A few weeks prior to harvest day, we spoke with Mike McAndrews and asked if it was okay for us to bring our harvest and he agreed. It is always interesting to see how another vineyard has figured out their pressing process. Before harvest, Mike and my husband agreed that he would be bringing the harvest in lugs. Our friends stacked the grape filled lugs into the U-Haul my husband rented and it sat overnight until Mike was ready on Monday morning to receive it.
Mike and his crew, Jim and Dakota were ready at 7 a.m. and we were at Stonington Vineyards little after that. The U-Haul was backed up to their press on the loading dock and our friends Kim and Ted put the Auxerrois into the press.

The pressed juice then went into the FlexTank that my husband had in his truck and once the tank was filled, we drove it to our space at Taugwonk.

While we were transporting the filled tank, Jim and Dakota emptied the press, Kim and Ted filled the press with our Chardonnay harvest.

We got back to Stonington Vineyards in time to see the press being started for the Chardonnay. Kim and Ted were able to leave at 10:30!
That is efficient work!
We stayed and the Chardonnay pressing ended at 12:30. We transported the Chardonnay which ended up going into one full 80-gallon stainless steel tank and one partial 80-gallon stainless steel tank.
The statistics for our first harvest are:

Variety	Weight	Volume of Juice	Brix	pH	TA
Auxerrois	1695 lbs	135 gallons	19.0	3.5	6.6 g/L
Chardonnay	1562 lbs	125 gallons	20.4	3.41	9.8 g/L

On October 2, we racked the pressed Chardonnay juice from the two 80-gallon barrels into clean 80-gallon barrels, splitting the juice equally between the two barrels. We inoculated the Chardonnay with D47 yeast on October 3 at 11:30. By 6 p.m. we noticed action in our bubbler! We postulate that the pressed juice which we racked from the initial 80-gallon barrels to two 80-gallon barrels were already in some stage of native yeast fermentation. By October 4, the fermentation was going quite vigorously!
On October 4, we inoculated the Auxerrois which we had transferred from the FlexTank into a clean 630L Albrigi tank at 12:55. We used QA23 for this fermentation.
Both fermentations are going along well!
Thank you Kim, Ted, Mike, Jim and Dakota!

Vintage 2024: Our First Harvest

Our first harvest for Vintage 2024 occurred on Sunday, September 29. The call went out and 30 of our stalwart friends answered. A few of our friends came at 7:30 to help us raise the nets in 5 rows of Auxerrois and 8 rows of Chardonnay. The nets were raised by 9:45 and by 9:50 the harvesting commenced.
This year, we tried a new strategy. We divided our friends into two teams working two rows at a time. We had one of our friends in each of the rows with yellow lugs working as "runners". Our friends paired up with one person holding the lug and the other person cutting the grapes. This worked because truth be told, our crop was quite dismal.
We began in the Chardonnay with friends harvesting in rows 1 and 2 and in rows 3 and 4. My husband drove the tractor pulling the trailer in the alley between rows 2 and 3, with Barry collecting the full lugs.

Kim and Bob were the runners, ensuring that the lugs never got too full so that we could not hold them. The beauty of this method was many-fold. The lugs were never on the ground getting wet. We never had to bend up and down, putting the grapes in the lugs. The lugs were never left in the alley but immediately loaded on the trailer. By the timestamp on the pictures that my husband took, we began at 9:50 and finished at 11:00. That is 12 rows in a little over an hour!

Our friends took a mini-food break and were anxious to work on the 5 rows of Auxerrois. We employed the same method and the entire 13 rows of grapes were harvested by 12:15!
What did we do with the yellow lugs full of Chardonnay and Auxerrois? They were put into a U-haul that my husband rented.

No more stacking the yellow lugs on a pallet and wrapping the pallet with shrink wrap! We celebrated with a lunch of homemade butternut squash soup, foccacia, and salad as well as a sampling of our Auxerrois and Chardonnay wines. We want to thank all of our friends for helping us! Aloha!

Milestone in the Vineyard

Happy October 1st! This year marks a first in the vineyard. It is the first time that we were able to get all of the nets on all of our varieties before our first harvest! We finished dropping the nets on September 22!

With all of the nets protecting our grapes we were able to do something that is another first in the vineyard. With our friend, Laurie's help, we bagged 800 clusters of Chenin Blanc to be reserved for our botrysized, late harvest wine.

It will be interesting to see how these early bagged grapes turn into noble-rot infected grapes.
Meanwhile, we had our first harvest of Chardonnay and Auxerrois this past weekend. Details to follow.