2019 Cabernet Franc Harvest

Our friends were game to come and help us with the harvesting of a small (large for us) amount of Cabernet Franc on Saturday, October 26. This decision was made largely because we saw that on Sunday, there would be a rain event that would bring between 1-3 inches of rain to our region.
So, we decided to harvest at 1:30 p.m. It turned out to be a beautiful afternoon. Our friends, Bob and Betsy who always exceed expectations came early to help us with the netting and when 1:30 came around, we began harvesting the two rows of Cabernet Franc. With 10 people, the harvest was accomplished in 45 minutes!

The harvest which was accommodated in 29 lugs was stored in our container until Monday. On Monday morning, my husband and I put the stored fruit into the half ton bin and hauled it to Jonathan Edwards Winery.

Once at the winery, Michael and Alex took over and the Cabernet Franc in the bin was weighed. Subtracting the weight of the half ton bin, we came up with 377 pounds of grapes. The next thing was to get the grapes into the destemmer/crusher. The rollers in the crusher was set so that the destemmed berries would be gently crushed.

Once again, we thank all of our friends who came to help us harvest and Michael and Alex for their help at the winery!

Tracking the 2019 Cabernet Franc Numbers

This is the first year that we will be having a good amount of Cabernet Franc to harvest. We have waited this long to harvest the grapes because of an abnormally high amount of titratable (TA) acid in our sampling.
Here is a recap of what we have been seeing:

Variety	Test Date	# of Berries	Weight	Volume of Juice	Brix	pH	TA
Cabernet Franc	9/14/2019	45	47 g	15 mL	16.5	2.68	NA
Cabernet Franc	9/30/2019	40	48 g	17 mL	20.4	2.98	9.1 g/L
Cabernet Franc	10/5/2019	40	58 g	15 mL	21.6	2.99	11.9 g/L
Cabernet Franc	10/13/2019	40	53 g	20 mL	21.4	3.09	13.3 g/L
CF Clone 214	10/20/2019	30	36 g	12.5 mL	23	3.13	11.5 g/L
CF Clone 327	10/20/2019	30	39 g	10 mL	22	3.04	11 g/L
Cabernet Franc	10/23/2019	76	86 g	35 mL	22.4	3.10	9.3 g/L

On October 20, we decided to take readings on our two clones of Cabernet Franc separately to see if they were any differences with the Brix and the titratable acids. Our readings show that they were within range of each other although clone 327 seemed to be a little behind. On October 23 when we took our last reading, we finally had a titratable acidity that we could live with.
The other experiment that my husband conducted was a paper chromatography experiment. Here, we wanted to qualitatively see what the ratio of tartaric acid to malic acid was.
Here are the results:

In paper chromatography, the compound with the lowest molecular weight will move the farthest. Therefore, in lanes 1 and 10, lactic acid is at the top of the chromatogram. Similarly in lanes 2 and 9, malic acid is in the middle of the chromatogram and in lanes 3 and 8, tartaric acid can been seen as being lower than the lactic and malic acids.
In lanes 4-7, my husband spotted the samples of interest to us. Since we know the titratable acids of our 2019 Barbera, 2018 Cabernet Franc wine, 2019 Cabernet Franc juice and 2019 Cabernet Sauvignon juice, we were interested in the qualitative comparisons as determined by the paper chromatography. The 2018 Cabernet Franc wine in lane 5 is the only lane that showed any appreciable amounts of lactic acid, indicating that the wine underwent malolactic fermentation and converted some of the malic acid to lactic acid. Comparison the Cabernet Franc juice in lane 6 to the Cabernet Sauvignon juice in lane 7, a case can be made that the Cabernet Sauvignon juice might have a bit more malic acid.
We are harvesting our Cabernet Franc today and holding off harvesting our Cabernet Sauvignon until a little later in the coming week.

Inoculating Our 2019 Chenin Blanc

Our 2019 Chenin Blanc was harvested on October 14, 2019 and the pressing occurred on October 14 and 15th. The first step that we do after pressing is a cold settling, which occurred on October 15 and 16th. On Thursday, October 17th, we headed back to Jonathan Edwards to work with winemaker, Michael Harney to rehydrate and temper our yeast, QA23. This was no easy feat to go to Jonathan Edwards Winery because the roads were made impassable by the storm that came through on Wednesday night bringing gusts in excess of 70 mph.

Once we got to the winery, Michael had already moved the cold settled wine into the tank destined for fermentation. He showed us how clear our juice already was!
We proceeded to rehydrate 300 grams of QA23 in 3 liters of water at 104 degrees F. This was done for approximately 20 minutes to allow the temperature to drop before we added some Chenin Blanc juice. We waited until the temperature approached 10 degrees of the temperature of the juice in the tank to inoculate.

The 300 gallons of Chenin Blanc juice was inoculated at noon.

Since the inoculation of the Chenin Blanc on October 17, Michael has updated us on the status of our fermentation. As of today, the Brix has come down from 21 Brix to 15.5!

Weighing In and Pressing at Jonathan Edwards

Our 2019 Chenin Blanc Harvest occurred on Monday, October 14. We had a convoy of trucks that took our harvest to Jonathan Edwards where each pallet was weighed.

Pallet Number	Gross Weight	Pallet + Lug Weight	Net Weight
1	894	146	748
2	829	151	678
3	844	154	690
4	869	154	715
5	864	147	714
6	465	85	385

The weighing and processing of the grapes happened over two days. The first three pallets were done on Monday, October 14 and then last three pallets were done the following morning on Tuesday, October 15. When all was weighed the total weight of the harvest came to 3930 pounds, just a little shy of 2 tons!
After the pallets were weighed, the whole cluster grapes went into the press that Michael had set up. What was interesting was that after one turn of the press to even out the load, many of the berries had fallen off of the rachis!

The juice just flowed from the press in no time at all!

We thank all of our friends who transported the harvest to Jonathan Edwards Winery and the crew at Jonathan Edwards for being there to help us with the weighing and pressing of our first big harvest of Chenin Blanc!