Vintage 2026: Chenin Blanc Harvest

We took a two week break between the Chardonnay harvest and our Chenin Blanc harvest. Our friend Mary helped us to get a representative sampling of grapes from our 17 rows of Chenin Blanc on October 14. We learned that for rows 1 through 6 the Brix was at 18.8, rows 7-12 at 17.5 and our FPS-1 clone was at 17. These numbers are too low to make a good still wine. So we had a few decisions to make.

We decided that we should go through the first 8 rows of Chenin Blanc to see if we could do anything to raise the Brix a few degrees. This is what we decided to do. Beginning on October 20, my husband and I went through our Chenin Blanc, tasting the green grapes and determining if they should be cut off.
In the photo above, there is a bin of the green grapes as well as rotten grapes that we removed. It did take us until Friday, October 23 to go through all 8 row, cutting off the green clusters and the clusters affected with sour rot and botrytis. We hauled the culled grapes to our compost pile. Here is what nearly a ton of grapes looks like on the ground in the photo on the right.
Since the weather on Sunday, October 25 looked to be a promising one for harvest, my husband sent out a call to our friends. Initially a handful of people responded but as the harvest date approached we had a good crew of harvesters. We started with raising the nets at 8 and at 9, people were assembled to begin harvesting. All of us were focused on bringing in the 8 rows of Chenin. Sad to say, neither my husband nor I stopped to take any pictures!
When all was said and done, we had 88 filled lugs to bring to Stonington Vineyards on Monday morning. The crew at Stonington Vineyards, Mike, Jim and Dakota were also busy destemming the rest of their Carbernet Franc that they began harvesting on Sunday. But since processing red grapes is different from processing white grapes the two were done simultaneously on their loading dock. We were able to get our pressed juice by 12:30! We brought the juice back to our facility at Taugwonk Spur and took some measurements of the juice.

The Brix as measured by the hydrometer method came in at 22! We had about 170 gallons of juice in our transport tank.
Here are the statistics for our Chenin Blanc harvest:

Variety	Harvest Date	Brix	pH	TA g/L	Lbs	Gals
Chwnin Blanc	October 25, 2026	22.0	3.05	8.30 g/L	2,125	170

We want to thank all of our friends who turned up to make our Chenin Blanc harvest a successful one! A big thank you to those who stayed late to help get the lugs into the truck!