On another beautiful day, September 28, our friends came to help us harvest the Chardonnay. Our friends, Laurie, Elizabeth, Bob and Ted came early to help us lift the nets and we were ready to harvest around 9 a.m. Since we have 8 rows of Chardonnay, our strategy was to do two rows in one pass from the south end to the north end and then return doing two rows from the north end to the south end.
Here are photos of the people who came to help us:
We had a few new people join our crew: Carol, Dori, Kathy and Charlotte. They all picked up on how we harvest our grapes and were a terrific addition to our crew. Charlotte in the brown and white polka-dotted shirt made sure that none of the grapes remained on the vine and went back and checked. Here you can see her with a fist full of grapes!
We collected the filled lugs as we went along, and here you can see Ted, making sure that each lug has been properly filled and stacked in the back of our trailer.
Once we reached the south end, the lugs were put into the rental van and it was time for a break. We did two of these 4 row passes and finished up around 12:30. We served lunch and my husband opened up the 2020 Chardonnay for the harvesters to sample. It was an enjoyable time and we hope that our crew had fun, even though we know that harvesting is difficult work.
On Monday, we took the grapes to Stonington Vineyard, where Mike, Jim and Dakota were waiting for us to arrive at 9 a.m. They have a very efficient process there. The pressing took 2-1/2 hours and we were done by noon. The juice that came out of the grapes looked really good and we took a sample to get some harvest numbers.
| Variety |
Weight |
Volume |
Brix |
pH |
TA |
| Chardonnay |
1950 pounds |
156 gallons |
22.0 |
3.28 |
8.0 g/L |
On Monday afternoon, we took the washed lugs back to our vineyard. The picture there was one of a calm end of summer day. It would be hard to imagine that a day ago, there was such frenetic harvesting activity going on!
Thank you to all our harvesters who spent their Sunday helping us bring in our Chardonnay crop!
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