Harvesting grapes

We Finished the Harvest!

Debbymff • October 4, 2015

We finished our first harvest—hooray!

Before I tell/show you more about the harvest, I want to thank my “happiness engineer” (this is the title they use) at WordPress.com for telling me about an app called EXIFPurge that removes orientation metadata from photos. It’s now an added step to run my blog photos through EXIFPurge before loading them, but no more upside down/inside out photos!

About the harvest...

We harvested seven varieties which totaled 23 ½ tons of grapes from our vineyard and two vineyards we lease. Depending on the variety its now in barrels or tanks at King Family Vineyard transitioning from grapes to wine.

Harvesting is a truly tactile process—drawing heavily on sight, taste, and odor. I can’t capture the taste or smell but I’ve got some great photos that will give you a sense of the whole process. We harvested four of the five red grapes that are used to make a Bordeaux blend.

Cabernet Franc (left)

Cabernet Sauvignon (right)

Merlot (left)

Petit Verdot

We also harvested three whites.

This is young Chardonnay several weeks before harvesting.

Pinot Gris is the gray white wine

Viognier is the considered the white wine of Virginia.

In addition to great grapes, we discovered you need the help of fabulous friends and family to get the harvest in.

We had some beautiful weather for harvesting and also some very wet days. Can you identify the people under the rain gear?

After harvest, the grapes were transported to King Family Vineyards and stored in the cold room overnight.

The next day each pallet was weighed and then sorted.

Happily, we were fortunate to also have fabulous friends and family to help process the grapes at the sorting and vibrating tables.

So, what's next? First, Matthieu and Bruce will turn all those wonderful grapes into incredible wine. Then, we'll share them with you at Cunningham Creek Winery (at Middle Fork Farm). We plan to break this month -- stay tuned!

Time for Rose

Debbymff • September 11, 2015

As of Sunday, the whites (Chardonnay, Viognier, and Pinot Gris) were sorted, pressed and safely tucked into barrels and tanks (and available for a first taste). So, we moved on to making Rose using the young Cab Franc grapes harvested on Saturday.

Rose is usually made with red grapes that are lightly crushed and allowed to sit for a short time before being pressed. This makes the lovely pinkish color, which reflects the time on skins and grape variety.

As with the white grapes, after harvesting we refrigerated the grapes overnight. This helped them retain their juice and assured that they didn't prematurely start to ferment. On Sunday, they started their trek through various pieces of equipment to transition from fruit to wine. First, we sorted to eliminate bad fruit and then the grapes moved from sorting table to conveyor to de-stemmer to bin.

They stayed in covered bins until Tuesday, when they moved again. This time from bin to conveyor to press.

After the press, the juice (collected in the trough below) went to stainless steel tanks. In the late spring, It will be bottled and we hope you’ll come by next summer to enjoy some with us.

Rose is best served chilled and (based on my research) pairs well with almost anything—spicy foods, cheeses, flatbread, salads, seafood, and more. Check out Food and Wine for some tasty sounding recipes.

So far, I've been telling you about the "fun" part of making wine but I've failed to mention that there's a whole lot of equipment and winery cleaning that takes place constantly. You could say that 75% of wine making is actually spent cleaning. Fortunately, we had lots of help!

Gary (the newest member of the Lucy and Ethyl Club) received kudos for getting the conveyor the cleanest ever.

Sometimes its not just cleaning but taking apart and then cleaning. Here's Rick cleaning the de-stemmer after he disassembled it.

Stay tuned for news of our red grape harvest -- Merlot, Cab Franc, Petit Verdot, Cab Sav, and Malbec. Depending on the weather, we'll start next week.

Harvesting, Sorting, & Pressing

Debbymff • August 31, 2015

We've been really busy harvesting, sorting, and pressing for the past week. As of Saturday night, we've progressed to the wine making process for Pinot Gris, Viognier, and Chardonnay.

Pinot Gris was the first to be harvested--approximately 4 1/2 tons, which will make about 300 cases of wine! As you can imagine, harvesting goes much faster with many hands. So, we were fortunate that along with Bruce, Rick, our regular farm crew, and me, our friend, Brandon, stopped by and helped.

Like every job, there's a certain amount of prep before you get to the main event. Before harvesting, there are two main tasks. The order doesn't really matter. The bird netting needs to be unclipped at the bottom and raised up. For me, this is the worst part -- lots of bending and sometimes contorting to get the clip undone. Also lugs to hold the clusters have to be distributed every few plants along the rows that are going to be harvested. Each lug holds 25-30 lbs and at the end of the harvest we drive down the rows and load the full lugs on the truck or trailer.

The actual harvesting was really fun, as harvesting anything you've grown always is! Each cluster of grapes is inspected before we clip it and drop it into a lug. We check for sour rot (smells like vinegar) and bird, bug, or critter damage and remove the bad grapes. This makes sorting at the winery go much faster.

In addition to our 2-legged harvesters, we had Snickers and Doodle. Their job descriptions were at first unclear but Doodle quickly appointed herself "official protector of filled lugs" and took this job very seriously. Snickers did what herd dogs do--she herded me and made sure I didn't get lost in the vineyard.

Once the grapes are loaded up, it goes to King Family Winery for processing. First, it's refrigerated overnight and then the next day it gets sorted--once again looking for bad grapes--and pressed. The sorting table always reminds me of Lucy and Ethyl hiding chocolates in their hats (and elsewhere). For that reason, I've initiated the Lucy and Ethyl Club for all our friends who graciously volunteer to help with this task. Pam is the most recent member of this very exclusive club.

From the sorting table, it travels up the conveyor belt to the press, where the grapes are pressed and juice is extracted. The juice goes into a fermenter for 1-3 weeks depending on the style of wine being made. From there it goes into either stainless steel tanks or oak barrel to await bottling. The winemakers, Matthieu and Bruce, monitor it along the way for flavor and body so that's it tastes just right when it gets to your glass!