Chambourcin Harvest 2013

It only took us one day to harvest our grapes, with some helpers, a perfect day and an early start!  We alternated between  picking and crushing, then cleaning up - and started over.  In a way, this was a "test" year, since we don't have that many vines bearing fruit yet. 

We started with picking:

Brought everything to the "crush pad" by the barn:

 

Where we weighed each container - and also weighed some of the larger clusters (some weighed over 1 lbs):

 

 

We used our cider press - minus the actual press part - for crushing the grapes, and the we manually did the de-stemming.  In addition to pulling out all the stems, we were also paying close attention to spiders, stink-bugs and all sorts of other critters.  We were closely on the look-out for Asian lady bugs (the yellow kind), but did not find a single one.

 

 

The crushed berries were dumped into one of our fermenters: