New Temperature Controlled Fermentation Chamber

Last year, my husband took our refrigerator and turned it into a dedicated temperature controlled fermentation chamber. Earlier this year, old faithful refrigerator-cum-fermentation-chamber bit the dust. What can I say, it was about 30 years old. We postponed getting a replacement but NOW is the time. My husband looked on line and found HomeBrewTalk.com where they had all the specifications for Sizing Your Corny Kegs for Fermentation.
After cluster counting and bagging our grapes, we feel that we will at least have twice as much juice as we had last year. (Last year, we had 70 pounds of grapes that yielded 5 gallons of juice). This presented a problem regarding what type of fermentation vessel we should invest in. There was no question about using stainless steel again, but the question was what size?

We already have two one-sixth barrels that can hold approximately 5 gallons each. We feel that we may have about 12 gallons of juice this year. We want to give enough head space for the fermenting must to allow for the initial foaming, so we went with two slim-quarters to hold our juice. Once we decided on the type of keg, the following layout plan from HomeBrewTalk helped us decide what kind of chest freezer would work to hold our kegs.

We got lucky. Even though all of this necessary equipment is being purchased at the eleventh hour, we were able to get the chest freezer on sale with delivery on Thursday, September 1st and our two one-quarter stainless steel Sanke kegs are arriving today.
References:
1. Barrel Sizes photo from: Wort-O-Matic.com.

Late-season fungicide sprays in grapes and potential effects on fermentation

My husband shared this article with me from Michigan State University called Late-season fungicide sprays in grapes and potential effects on fermentation. I thought about one of the questions that I had to answer when I took the U.C. Davis Enology and Viticulture Certification course. The question consisted of a very long scenario which included the fact that the original fruit was in excellent condition and then "Why was there the odor of sulfides emanating from a tank of fermenting Chenin blanc." I answered the question as best as I could but totally missed the mark. The key is "original fruit was in excellent condition". At that time, I couldn't connect the fact that fruit in excellent condition may be the result of a well executed spray schedule that included sulfur as a fungicide.
The above article is all about late season use of fungicide sprays and the pre-harvest interval or PHI timing of sprays and its effects on fermentation.
Here is my summary:

Fungicide	Pre-Harvest Interval (PHI)	Effect on Fermentation
Oxidate	Day of harvest	No issues
Biofungicide Serenade	Day of harvest	No issues
Sulfur	5-6 weeks	H2S (hydrogen sulfide) or rotten egg smell
Copper	Late season usage	Copper is toxic to yeast and even non-lethal doses of copper can cause stress on the yeast, potentially leading to incomplete fermentation and release of undesirable metabolites, all leading to wine aroma defects
Captan	Late season usage	Can delay the start of alcoholic fermentation, captan-treated grapes retained a definite cloudiness after six months of storage
Manzate	66 days before harvest	Preventing chemical residue and degradation product left on fruit; not necessarily affecting fermentation
Ridomil MZ	66 days before harvest	Preventing chemical residue and degradation product left on fruit; not necessarily affecting fermentation
potassium bicarbonate (Kaligreen, Armicarb, Milstop)	Late season usage	Contains potassium so best to avoid a heavy application shortly before harvest
Botryticides Elevate, Vangard and Scala	Late season usage	Safe for both alcoholic and malolactic fermentation
strobilurins (i.e., Sovran, Abound)	Late season usage	No effect on fermentation but late-season use of strobilurins is not recommended due to possible fungicide resistance issues
sterol inhibitors (i.e., Elite, Rally)	Late season usage	No effect on fermentation
powdery mildew fungicide Quintec	Late season usage	No effect on fermentation
JMS Stylet Oil	Good late-season spray to reduce powdery mildew and European red mite	Some evidence that late applications depress Brix (sugar) accumulation due to a temporary reduction in photosynthesis; other California studies show no effect on fermentation

Bird Damage and Wedding Bags in the Vineyard

While we were busy with putting in the irrigation, there were things that got pushed down the list of thing to do, such as cluster counting. Cluster counting is not an onerous thing, it just needs to get done. Our friend Mary, came by on August 2 so that we could have some idea of how much netting we needed to order. Last year, we had our first, very small crop of grapes and we ordered a netting called tightlock, from our supplier. It worked perfectly to keep out even little insects.

So, after Mary counted all of the grape clusters that she could see, my husband called our supplier to order the netting. We then got some very bad news, our supplier was all out of tightlock netting. We should not be surprised since this type of order should really be placed much earlier than the middle of August. We were in a quandry, what to do, what to do. Then, we remembered that on one of the forums that my husband belongs to, there is a grape grower in Japan who bags all of their grapes. We decided that we could do that for our grapes as well, so my husband went on line to check out how much these bags would cost. It was little cost prohibitive for the 1000 or so clusters that we have. Ever the resourceful person, my husband looked up wedding organza bags and we decided to go with wedding bags in the vineyard.
We ordered 1000 wedding organze bags about 10 days ago. Our son was here this weekend so we put him to work.

Most of our Chenin blanc are around 8 ^oBrix or so. But some of our Chenin blanc grapes are at 16 ^oBrix! It's a little early this year, compared to last year when we saw turkeys eating our grapes, this year, we are seeing bird damage. With our son's help, we were able to bag almost half of the Chenin blanc grape clusters.

Irrigation Manifold Assembly

At the same time that Tony and his crew were installing the pump and motor, my husband was busy assembling the irrigation manifold.

My husband made the assembly in three sections so that each section weighed approximately the same amount and will make it easier when it comes time to disassemble the system for storage during the winter. I'll walk you through the system beginning on the lower right hand side of the above picture.
First is the well and the blowout pipe on the ground. The wire that you also see in the picture below is for the pressure sensor:

On the scaffold, the first section of the irrigation assembly consists of the following:

The Y-strainer and a backflow preventer come next in the assembly.

The third section consists of the following two pictures. The disc filter and the continuous air vent:

With the manifold assembled, we are ready for the water!