Vintage 2025: Chenin Blanc Harvest and Pressing - Part 1

As harvest time approaches, we are weather watchers and the forecast was for a frost on Friday morning, October 10. When we drove to the vineyard, the grass was covered with a coating of frost but the vineyard itself was spared the frost. The leaves on the vines were still green and the sun came up. The early crew raised the nets in preparation for harvesting the first round of Chenin Blanc.

Our harvesters gathered at the 10 a.m. start time. We had some new harvesters including Kim, Mark, Erica, and Ava, and Dan, John and Andolfo from Greystone.

We harvested 8 rows of Chenin Blanc. From raising the nets, one break to "grapes all in" took from 8:00 to 2:00.

By the time we had "lunch" it was after 2, but the sun was up and we enjoyed the time with our harvesters. My husband pulled out the 2020 Chenin Blanc to serve with lunch.
On the following day, Saturday, October 11, we took our harvest to Stonington Vineyards to be pressed. We are so fortunate that Mike and his crew, Dakota and Jim are so accommodating and willing to help us on a weekend! We pulled up the rental truck to their loading dock and put the lugs of grapes into their press. They were also harvesting their Cabernet Franc and the destemmer-crusher was on the other end of their loading dock.
I am a fan of loading docks! I hope we can incorporate a loading dock into our future winery at the vineyard.
Because we press our grapes as whole clusters, we had to do two pressings. The first press took from 9:30 to 12:00. We put in 81 lugs worth of grapes.
After the first pressing we had approximately 170 gallons of juice. Our IBC transport tank can hold 300 gallons of pressed juice so we had to go back to our winery space at Taugwonk Spur to round up as many cleaned kegs as we could. The second press of 83 lugs took from 12:30 to 3:00.

The 300 gallon IBC tank and the kegs that we brought back to Stonington Vineyards accommodated the rest of the juice from the second pressing. We measured the Brix using our hydrometer and the numbers for the first Chenin harvest looks like this:

Variety	Weight	Volume	Brix	pH	TA
Chenin Blanc rows 1-8	4375 pounds	350 gallons	23.0	3.02	8.90 g/L

Thank you to everyone who helped in harvesting round one of our Chenin Blanc! We really appreciate our community of harvesters and the great group at Stonington Vineyards!