Harvest

Harvest for Rose'

The Grapes were at 21 Brix so it was time for our first harvest of the year. We harvested about 2 tons of grapes that would be used for Rose'.

Harvest starts very early in the morning getting the buckets and grape bins ready for the pickers. The pickers put the grapes into 5 gallon buckets, that are then dumped into large grape bins. Each grape bin can hold up to one half ton of grapes. Typically they are around 850 pounds when we pick.

 Here it is a little after 6:00 AM everything is ready and the pickers arrived shortly after to start.

The Pickers move very quickly through the vineyard picking grapes. This group spent all night at another Vineyard harvesting and then came to spend a few hours harvesting in our Vineyard before a little sleep and back to it. They are a very hard working bunch.

Here is a bin full of our grapes ready to be taken to the winery to process

Here is 5 1/2 bins, 2 tons (4000 pounds) of grapes delivered to the winery. At this point my job is done. 

 But I stuck around to capture some of the process to share. Here the bins are being dumped into the press where they will be pressed into juice. Different wines are processed in different ways, for some they remove the stems but in this case the winemaker prefers to leave the stems on during the press.

Here is a view of the bottom of the press where the juice is collected in a tub below the press. 

The juice is pumped from the tub/press (show in the background) into a storage container. 

Here is the inside of the container while it is getting filled up. 

Here is the outside of the container. It is roughly 300 gallons and was almost completely full when we were done. The juice will sit in this container for 24 hours. This allows the particulates to settle to the bottom. Once settled the juice will be transferred into the stainless steel barrels on the left to ferment.