Harvest 2008 Begins!

Sunday morning we decided to pull the trigger and bring in the whites, well what was left of them.  The day before it seems the boars got a little hungry and did some pretty extensive sampling of both vineyards.  We didn't get much more rain on Thursday night, so it turned out well when the mistral started blowing on Friday as predicted, and it's still blowing now.  It's not often that I am happy about the Mistral blowing, but right now it's our savior.

We took a skeleton crew out to pick, since we knew it wasn't going to take us very long.  My parents, Matt's mom Joan and my good friend Alison Rosenblum and her daughter Delilah.  My mom made muffins and brought coffee so it made the morning very pleasant!  A little while later our "new best friend" Even Bakke  showed up with two of his interns Woody and Amira, so the picking went really quickly.

After that we returned to the house to press the grapes and have some lunch.  Even very very very kindly loaned us some of his equipment this year since we will harvest several days before he starts, well at least normally we would, though I'm not sure what will happen this year, the reds are limping along but getting there!  We decided to de-stem the white grapes (which usually isn't done) since we have a basket press which doesn't tend to extract as much juice as a pneumatic press or a horizontal press.  So, we thought maybe this would help.  Even let us bring over his de-stemmer and his must pump from his winery in the Ventoux about an hour away from here.  He took one look at our little crusher de-stemmer and vetoed it's use this year.  Well, that was before it got cold here and the grapes started ripening more and more slowly, if Even's grapes catch up with ours we'll have to resort back to our little machine, but we're hoping it will all work out.

 So, we de-stemmed the grapes and then loaded them into the press turned it on and waited for the juice to start flowing.  We let the press cycle through once and then pulled the cage out and dug down into cake of skins to break it up because there were still lots and lots of whole grapes that hadn't been squished.  Meanwhile my Matt's mom Joan had made a batch of her world famous chocolate chip cookies, so we got to enjoy them while we were hard at work!

In the end we got about 300 liters of juice which will hopefully start fermenting without the help of added yeast!  BUT, I warn all of you, this year I will not hesitate to innoculate the white if it doesn't start on it's own.  As I told Even this morning, I want to make white wine this year, not pour it down the drain like I had to do with our rosé last year!

Comments

[Alex]

Best of luck with the remainder of your harvest & the wine making!

I'm going to be a bit further east of you next week and I'm wondering if they've started picking yet or not ...

[Dale Cruse]

I always love seeing these behind-the-scenes wine making photos. Keep 'em coming!