Chardonnay Harvest 2019

Saturday, September 28, 2019 was our Chardonnay harvest. It was a beautiful day, perfect for harvest. We had a crew of 11 adults and 3 young adults helping us pick the grapes. We have 8 rows of Chardonnay, equally divided between clone 76 and clone 96. When I say "row", I should also mention that each row is nearly 800 feet long, so it is somewhat daunting, without the help of everyone involved. It took from 9 a.m. to 1 p.m. to pick approximately 291 pounds of Chardonnay.

Since this is a small harvest, we chose to stick to our previous routine of taking the grapes to our home to foot stomp in order to extract the juice. The first order of events was to feed our hard working harvesters with some lunch so that they had the energy to carry out the juice extraction step. Everyone lined up and had their turn at stomping the grapes and tasting the juice of their labor.

We also had help in the cellar, where the juice was being transported via gravity into two cleaned 15 gallons kegs. The wine lingo for people who work in the winery is "cellar rats". Our young adults aka cellar rats, who participated in harvest and stomping were now part of collecting the extracted juice that flowed from the stomping tub into the 15 gallons kegs. My husband was overseeing the cellar rats so no doubt they were being educated in the process that they were participating in.
Here are the smiling faces of our indefatigable cellar rats!

The numbers for the extracted juice looked like this:

Variety	Weight	Volume of Juice	Brix	pH	TA
Chardonnay	291 pounds	26 gallons	21.5	3.16	9.3 g/L

We couldn't have done this without the help of our fabulous crew who stayed with us until the last mash bag of Chardonnay was pressed and safely in the kegs! Thank you to all who participated!

Auxerrois Next Steps After Harvest

Our Auxerrois Harvest occurred on Monday, September 23, 2019. We took our grapes to a nearby winery to have the grapes pressed and the juice was put into a stainless steel barrel modified to be temperature controllable. The barrel was wrapped with a cooling snake and then with insulated for the initial cold settling step.

The next steps occurred yesterday, September 25, 2019. After cold settling, the juice was gravity racked from the one barrel into another. Our protocol is to take over some of the settled larger particulate matter to be the "food" for the growing yeast.

The winemaker guessed that we might have about 50 gallons of juice. When the transfer of the juice was made, what was left in the barrel was about 1/2 gallon of sluggy stuff which we decided to pitch. All in all, we thought that was a good recovery of juice.
The next steps were to take an aliquot of the juice with which to temper the yeast. For our yeast, we are using QA23. Since the estimate of juice was approximately 50 gallons, 50 grams of yeast was rehydrated in 500 mL of water at 110 degrees.
During the initial step when the yeast was being rehydrated, the winemaker took the Auxerrois juice and put it into a graduated cylinder to measure the sugar content with a hydrometer. We have never had enough juice to do this so it was a new experience!
The hydrometer, with the temperature corrected reading was 19.6 Brix. At the same time, the pH was measured and it was 3.26. The winemaker also took the titratable acid reading ant that turned out to be 7.35 g/L.
So the numbers for our 2019 Auxerrois juice are:

Variety	Weight	Volume of Juice	Brix	pH	TA
Auxerrois	636 pounds	50 gallons	19.6	3.26	7.35 g/L

The rehydrated, tempered yeast was put into the barrel at 2:32 p.m.! We took some of the juice home with us and also measured the level of sulfur dioxide in the initial fermentation and the number was 29 ppm, which is a nice reading to begin fermentation. Crossing our fingers.

Auxerrois Harvest 2019

Yesterday, September 23 was our first harvest of this year. We and a crew of 4 people harvested 2-1/2 rows of Auxerrois beginning at 8 and finishing at 11:30. We decided to harvest our Auxerrois because the last numbers that we took for the grapes on September 19, 2019 ended up looking like this:

Variety	# of Berries	Weight	Volume of Juice	Brix	pH	TA
Auxerrois	100	187 g	80 mL	18.8	3.19	11.5 g/L

We looked at the weather for the upcoming week and it looked as if we would be getting some rain on Tuesday so we decided to harvest on Monday, September 23. The call went out to our crew of harvesters, we only needed a few people since there weren't too many grapes to pick, but still we anticipated that we would get about 1/2 a ton (1000 pounds) of grapes.

The Auxerrois grape can become very golden in color. The clusters are on the loose side and each individual grape reminds me of a marble. Here is our crew, sans two people who had to leave us at 10:30. When all was said and done, we had 35 lugs of grapes.

Fortunately, 35 is easily divisible by 5 so when all was said and done, we had a stack of 5 x 7 lugs which we wrapped for transport to a local winery who will be helping us with the pressing and fermentation.

The first thing to do was to weigh the stack. It came in at 784 pounds but subtracting the weight of the lugs and the pallet, the weight of the grapes ended up being 636 pounds. Into the press, went the whole cluster grapes. Since we normally foot stomp our grapes, the wine maker guided us in selecting a mild pressing protocol which was press program 1 out of 9 different press programs. The juice came out looking like this:

Although my husband at this point said that he was just tired, I was very excited. Although the weight of the grapes was lower than we anticipated, the amount of extracted juice ended up being about 60 gallons. To give you some kind of perspective, last year's harvest of Auxerrois yielded 6 gallons of juice from which we made 1 case of 750 mL and 2 cases of 375 mL Auxerrois wine. So, 60 gallons is an order of magnitude more than we ever had before!

Our heartfelt thanks to the harvesters who came to help us yesterday!

Chenin Blanc Update

Here is a photo of one of our bunches of Chenin Blanc clone 982. You can see by the line post gradations, from notch to notch it is 4 inches so that means that this bunch is nearly 8 inches tall and has a small wing to the side. Chenin Blanc clone 982 produces bunches with very tight clusters which can be tricky for maintaining clean grapes. But the tight cluster means that the bunch can have significant weight and I would guestimate that the weight of this cluster is about 8 ounces.
In 2017, I took the measurements of one of the bunches of Chenin Blanc that I inadvertently cut and blogged about in Vital Statistics for our Chenin Blanc. In that photo, the bunch of Chenin Blanc is 6 inches x 4 inches and weighed 7.45 ounces.
Our Chenin Blanc is finally accumulating some sugars. The most recent test taken on September 14, 2017 showed the following:

Variety	# of Berries	Weight	Volume of Juice	Brix	pH	TA
Chenin Blanc	100	138 g	55 mL	14.6	2.62	16.8 g/L

We have a week of fine weather coming up so we hope that our Chenin Blanc continues on it's course of ripening.