Vintage 2025: Chardonnay Harvest and Pressing

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!

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.