Vintage 2025: Auxerrois Pressing and Statistics

On Monday afternoon, September 22, we took the Auxerrois to Stonington Vineyards for pressing. Mike, Jim and Dakota were there and helped us to unload 78 full lugs of Auxerrois into their press.

The pressing took approximately 2 hours. During that time, we were able to rinse out our lugs. When the pressing was done we had approximately 160 gallons of juice.

We brought the juice back to our winery located on Taugwonk Spur which is less than 5 minutes away from Stonington Vineyards. Once there, we unloaded the IBC tank and took the hydrometer reading for the 2025 Auxerrois.

We held back a smaller amount of juice to get the numbers for pH and titratable acidity. The statistics for the 2025 Auxerrois are:

Variety	Weight	Volume	Brix	pH	TA
Axerrois	1950 pounds	160 gallons	21.0	3.24	5.30 g/L

Vintage 2025: Auxerrois Harvest

Our first harvest, Auxerrois occurred on Sunday, October 21, 2025. Looking back at my spreadsheet, this is the second earliest Auxerrois harvest, the earliest being in 2020. We had a group of our motivated friends come and help us with the harvest. We began at 7:30 with raising the nets on the five rows of Auxerrois. Harvest began at 9.
We harvest two rows at a time. We try not to put the lugs on the ground because when we begin the harvest the ground can be wet with dew. To accomplish this, my husband is on his tractor in the adjacent alley with the yellow lugs. We have one person, the "swapper", Ted, helping with the swapping of the full lugs with empty lugs.

We work in pairs. One person holds the lug while the other person harvests the grapes. This way there is minimal bending or throwing the grapes into the lugs on the ground. A few of our friends were able to find the milk carton towers that enabled them to put the lug on the tower and harvest.

There is a designated "runner" who is in charge of watching if the lugs are getting full and working with the "swapper" to get empty lugs.

The "swapper's" job is to make sure that each lug is appropriately filled with grapes so that they can be stacked. Once we reached the end of the alley, my husband and Ted put the full lugs into the Penske truck that he rented for transport to Stonington Vineyard on Monday.
We were finished harvesting the 5 rows of Auxerrois at 11:15! This allowed us have lunch and enjoy the beautiful day!

We want to thank our friends who came to help us for the Auxerrois harvest! Your help was much appreciated!

Passionfruit Estate Late Harvest Chenin Blanc

Recently, we sent out some samples of our red wines and our 2023 late harvest botrytized Chenin Blanc to get tested for alcohol content.

We received the results. We were very interested in how our Chenin Blanc tested because for that wine, we asked and received results for the following tests:
alcohol level = 16.3%
residual sugar = 48 g/L
titratable acidity (TA) = 9.5 g/L.
Since we had a shareable amount left in the bottle, we had our friends over for dinner. I regret that I didn't take a picture of the skinless salmon dish that my husband made with a side salad of fresh greens and fruits. We also had a Matthiasson Chardonnay to pair with the salmon. For dessert, my husband made this fig in phyllo cup with goat cheese on the bottom. We topped it off with our choice of honey or balsamic glaze. The late harvest Chenin Blanc paired very well with the fig in phyllo cup. It reminded our friends of a Vinsanto that they shared with us long ago.

Time For Us to Take Some Numbers

We have been taking refractometer readings of our Auxerrois and Chardonnay and found that the Brix ranged from 18-20 and it appeared that the Chardonnay might be farther along than our Auxerrois. It was time to get some real numbers for those grapes. On Saturday, my husband and I took representative samples from the Auxerrois and because we have two clones of Chardonnay, took representative samples from each of the two clones.
Back at home, we juiced the berries:

Once we got the juice, it was time to take the Brix, pH and the titratable acids (TA) for the three samples. For that, we have been using a little but handy device made by Vinmetrica. Initially, we were also doing the SO₂ test with the Vinmetrica but we have since switched to the Sentia for the SO₂ test. The Vinmetrica kit comes with a pH probe and reagents that allows us to take the titratable acid reading. The setup for us looks like this:

Here are the numbers for the Auxerrois, Chardonnay clone 76 and Chardonnay clone 96.

Variety	Brix	pH	TA
Auxerrois	19	3.04	6.7 g/L
Chardonnay clone 76	20	2.90	9.6 g.L
Chardonnay clone 96	20	2.95	11.3 g/L

What these numbers are telling us is that we need to seriously think about harvest dates and get ready! Also, it appears, (as is usually the case) that we will be harvesting the Auxerrois first and we have a little bit of time between that harvest and the Chardonnay harvest. Phew!

Vintage 2025: Labor Day Activities

For farmers, Labor Day is exactly that, a day of labor. We are busy clothes pinning our Chardonnay grapes that are ripening quickly. For that, we had stellar help from our daughter who made the trek down from Worcester on Saturday and helped with securing our Chardonnay from birds.
Today, we are working in the Chenin Blanc shoot tucking, leaf pulling and cleaning the graft union in hopes of lowering our nets on the Chenin Blanc as soon as possible.
It's the time of the year to update the annual cycle of growth chart and fill in the dates of veraison for our 6 grape varieties.

We keep track of the major events in the vintage, veraison being a very important one. I recently blogged about Vintage Notes 2025: The Auxerrois is at Veraison. The next variety to enter veraison this year was the Chardonnay, followed by the Cabernet Sauvignon, Cabernet Franc, Chenin Blanc and finally the Barbera.
Here are the grape varieties and what they look like at veraison.

It was interesting this year to watch the red varieties, Cabernet Sauvignon, Cabernet Franc and Barbera change color. The Cabernet Sauvignon was the first to enter veraison and by the time the Cabernet Franc was at veraison, the Cabernet Sauvignon grapes had all changed into a deep purple color. The warm days of late August worked their magic on the red varieities.