Sunday, September 8, 2013

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:



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