Harvest is complete!
Actually it was complete on Friday August 24th, but it took me this long to write about it! My parents came down from Michigan on Thursday and my sister came up from Atlanta. My neighbor, Peter Ness, kindly donated his time and his John Deere Gator as well. The day dawned a bit overcast, which actually worked out well, as the heat would have been awful otherwise.
Around 8:30am, Sean McRitchie dropped off the trailer and the bins. He left me the keys with instructions to drive the grapes to the winery once harvest was complete. We all began picking at 8:30am and finished off the plot by our house at 10:30am. We then started on the plot that borders Lakeview road. We worked until noon and then Jen and I went to Subway and picked up some subs for all the workers. we started up again around 12:30 and finished around 3pm. Overall it took us about 6.5 hours to pick about 1500lbs of grapes.
The grapes looked great. The riper cabernet franc had some bees, and the barbera and carminere was pretty much completely destroyed by bees and birds. The Pinotage with it’s thicker skin held up well. Next year, I’ll have to blast some sevin in there to keep the bees out if I want to get the grapes a little riper. I’ll post my final numbers once I get them from Sean.
My dad drove the truck to Sean’s winery and the rest of us followed in separate cars. Once we arrived Sean and a couple of his helpers weighed the grapes, then ran them through the destemmer. The destemmer worked really well. The grapes were essentially transferred from 1/2 tons bins to a 1 ton fermenting bin. The grapes were then covered and allowed to begin fermenting.
Sean was very kind and gave us a bottle of cider to toast our first harvest.