Our penultimate harvest occurred on Halloween! We had a skeleton crew of friends that came to help us harvest our red varieties. Since the red harvest was a small one and there were only 5 rows, we were confident that our friends would rise to the challenge. We began taking in the clothespins around 8:30 and the nets were raised. The crew was divided between the two rows of Cabernet Sauvignon and the one row of Barbera which we harvested, working from the south end to the north end. Once at the north end, the Cabernet Sauvignon (16 lugs) and Barbera (2 lugs) were loaded on to our truck and we worked our way from the north end to the south end harvesting Cabernet Franc (28 lugs). This harvest with our crew was done at 11!
A smaller group headed to our Taugwonk facility where we set up to stomp the harvest. The Cabernet Franc grapes went into a large tub, the one we used when we had our first harvests of Chenin Blanc. Mary showed Geoff and Bob how we put on the food grade plastic booties, got into the tub and stomped away!
Our first volunteer was Bob, who got bootied up and went into the Cabernet Franc to stomp! After doing a bit of stomping in the Cabernet Franc, he ceded his duty to Geoff and got into the gray tub with the small amount of Cabernet Sauvignon and Barbera.
It was now Geoff's turn and he did a great job of getting the juice out of the Cabernet Franc!
Here is photo of what the stomping looked like on a beautiful, Halloween day. After the stomping was done, we took some of the juice and took a hydrometer reading. We also sampled the juice and the Cabernet Franc at 25 degrees Brix was the sweetest grape juice ever!
| Variety |
Weight |
Volume
of Juice |
Brix |
pH |
TA |
| Cabernet Sauvignon - Barbera Mix |
120 lbs |
9.6 gal |
22.0 |
3.3 |
9.90 g/L |
| Cabernet Fanc |
250 lbs |
20 gal |
25.0 |
3.5 |
8.20 g/L |
Once again, a big thank you to everyone who came out to help us with our red harvest. Halloween was indeed a happy one for us and not scary at all!
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