LET THE HARVEST BEGIN

Maintaining a vineyard, especially a two acre organic one, is work beyond description. However, come late August early September, all that changes. Yes, there is still 'work' to do, plenty of it, but the work now seems pure pleasure.

There is nothing quite like the harvest!

I have been testing the Brix (sugar content) of our grapes for about a week and a half. Each variety has its own Brix level for harvest, for example the Edelweiss, which we harvested this past Saturday was at 15. The Sabre Vois should be in the 20's as should the Bluebells, which are a table grape, and the St. Croix is best in the upper teens.

Last Monday Bob Starks, from Vernon Vineyards, came to look at our grapes in anticipation of buying them. He deemed them far ahead of his grapes, and said they were really beautiful. (Wow!! I thought, finally a perk!) He wanted them on Saturday.

So Friday was spent collecting and gathering buckets. (Per usual, I way over estimated how many we'd need.) Bright and early Saturday morning we were ready to take the empty buckets to the vineyard.

Using buckets keeps the juices which drain out and are lost in the traditional grape picking containers. (Like those 30 yellow ones up in our barn we bought years ago at the beginning of this venture.)

Freddie is ready!

Although this photo appears grainy, it really is not...it was so early and so foggy that it looked just like this. The dew was heavy, and my shirt soon weighed several pounds more as it soaked up the water.

And they truly are beautiful!

Edelweiss is a wine grape, but it once was considered a fine table grape, perhaps a relative of the white Concord.

We spent nearly four hours harvesting the Edelweiss and took off for to Vernon Vineyards.

Vernon Vineyards sits atop a lovely ridge, the Tasting Room surrounded by 10 acres of Bob Starks own grapes.

We delivered our grapes on Saturday where he placed them in a cooler. He invited us back the next morning to watch the first pressing of the season, with our grapes. He said coffee would be on. So, bright and early we found ourselves back at the winery...

where our grapes were loaded onto the scale...

and although I was hoping for close to 700#, I was happy with 432, after weight of buckets subtracted.

Initially the grapes are dumped into a machine called the De-stemmer...

which separates the pulp from the stems....

...and shoots the pulp/juice out a 3" pipe, ready to go into the crusher.

This machine presses the pulp and extracts the juice used for making wine...

at the end a large black rubber bladder is inflated and further presses the grapes to get all of the juice possible.

The juice, which turns a darker color at this point from oxidization is channeled into a waiting bucket...

where it is stirred. Some of the sugar is added at this point.

The juice ends up in this tank, where it is monitored for settlement, and awaits the next step in its journey to the wine bottle.

Another perk...Bob said he was paying us an additional 5 cents per pound because the quality of our grapes was so good. Now if only we had a ton of them!!

Honestly, I kind of felt like we were on some kind of vacation, it was so much fun.

We will probably spend next weekend harvesting our Sabre Vois, St. Croix, and Frontenac, which we will bring to Weggy's winery.

Our Bluebell crop, which appears to be the heaviest of all our grapes this year, is already sold and will be harvested by the people to whom we sold them. (Although I may not be able to resist grabbing my grape fork (device that severs the bunch from the vine) and assisting.