After Grape Cleaning comes the most fun part of the day. You can channel your inner Lucy Ricardo (oh--you are too young to know Lucy Ricardo of "I Love Lucy"?). Regardless, the experience is rather mirthful and I can promise you that your feet never felt anything like this before.
The movie below is a compilation of photos taken from the Chardonnay Harvest that occurred on September 23, the Chenin Blanc harvest on October 6 and 7, and the final stomping on October 8, stitched together to make one movie that features all of our friends who came to help.
A last stomping was held on Sunday, October 8. There was a last bit (okay--a large bit) of grape cleaning to do and then the final stomping of the 2017 harvest. The stomping had to be timed as rain showers came early in the morning and then disappeared in the early afternoon. Our last stomper was Hannah, everyone else was rather stomped out. I dare you to not clap your hands, stomp your feet and otherwise have a happy body when stomping grapes to the Theme from Zorba the Greek:
I'll end this post with one final photo:
It's kind of an enigmatic photo. What is it, you ask? It is the imprint of our friend's hands on our home's vinyl siding! Opa!
First, the grapes had to be brought into our basement away from other real bees that might cause discomfort for our cleaning crew.
Imagine that you are in Burgundy and bringing the harvest into the cave. It could be a dark, musty area perhaps festooned with cob webs and mold. Or, it could be a bright florescent light environment with plastic chairs to do the task of grape cleaning in relative comfort.
Dictionary.com defines the term "bee" as derived from the Old English bēn meaning “a prayer, a favor.” By the late eighteenth century, bee had become commonly associated with the British dialect form, been or bean, referring to the joining of neighbors to work on a single activity to help a neighbor in need: sewing bee, quilting bee, etc. grape cleaning bee.
Little did our village cru know that the next step in our harvest process was something called the tweezer grape cleaning bee. Think of women (and equal opportunity for men) sitting around a circle with a grape cluster in hand, cleaning out the bad and yellow jacket afflicted grapes. It seemed as if everyone had their smart phones on mute and was focussed on the task of cleaning the grapes.
When all of the grapes were cleaned, they were either stomped or put into cold storage in our neighbor's scallop hauling truck.
Next blogpost will cover grape stomping. Come back and check it out!
On October 6 and October 7, we harvested our Chenin Blanc. One of my friends said that "it takes a village" to make a wine and I concur. First, it takes a Village Cru to harvest the grapes. Although we had an order of magnitude more grapes this year than last, it still only took about 1 hour on Friday and 1 hour of Saturday to harvest our entire crop. For our Chenin Blanc, we like to start as early as humanely possible so that we are starting with cool grapes that will have a chance to retain as much of their aromatics as possible. We have four friends who have designated themselves as "Team Long Pond" who came with head lamps on to unclip the netting so that the harvest could go smoothly.
Bob (Team Long Pond) was our designated tractor driver.
Here is our village cru in action:
Here is the harvest bounty on the truck ready for the crush pad:
Here is a photo of the Village Cru:
Here is a photo of our Premier Cru, Team Long Pond:
Next blogpost will cover the crush pad and beyond.
The harvest of our Chenin Blanc occurred over a few days. It began on September 29th with a small harvest of what we thought were the most yellow jacket afflicted clusters. On October 5, we harvested the grapes that were in wedding bags and scattered in the Chenin Blanc rows. Our major harvest dates occurred on October 6 and 7. For that, we sent out a message to our friends to
come to the aid of the harvest. This was to harvest the Chenin Blanc in the netted rows. The number of lugs reflect the number of cleaned lugs. We have an approximation that equates 3 cleaned lugs to 50 pounds so we can extrapolate that we had approximately 1100 pounds of grapes that yielded 97 gallons of wine.
Here is a tabular summary:
DATE
#LUGS
#GALLONS
September 29, 2017
9
10
October 5, 2017
7-1/2
14
October 6, 2017
9-1/2
14
October 7, 2017
19
30
October 8, 2017
22
29
Our harvest exceeded all of our wildest expectations and for that, we are grateful to our dedicated friends who came to help us pick the grapes. Providing more details in the blogposts to follow.
