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!