After a good nights sleep and a couple of advil, I am feeling like a new man!
It was a very strange harvest - as noted up thread, we picked our Syrah first on September 14th (800+ pounds). Things were looking good for a nice flow of grapes from there - Brix numbers on that date for the other four varietals were 22.8, 22.8, 22.6, and 22.0. We did need the pHs to come up a bit but in general in pretty good shape.
Well, Mother Nature has a warped sense of humor. Cool weather set in, we even had fog, and Brixs went down into the 20s and 21s for a couple of days, then crawled back to 22.x. Then hot weather kicked in - back into high 90s low 100s. Fruit just sat there for two weeks. Syrah meanwhile finished fermentation and went into beer kegs undergoing MLF and awaiting a little bit of Mourvèdre and Grenache to make up a full barrel.
At long last , on 9/28, the Mourvèdre (which should be the last grape to ripen of my five) made a run up to 24.9 with 3.47 pH when we picked. Just three rows, 63 plants, a little over 300 pounds, but we were moving again.
Grenache followed - Brix good at 25.4 but a scary pH of 3.13. (510 pounds). It crushed to 65 gallons of must. We added half a gallon of spring water and pH came up a little to 3.30. Added another half gallon, pH came up to 3.43. Brix declined a little to 25.2 but we were fine with that.
Carignane was a nice straight forward pick of 42 vines (250 pounds). Brix 3.45 pH 3.45. Nice straight forward ferment thus far with a great color.
Then we waited for the Primitivo. It’s the biggest share of the vineyard at 211 vines. We decided with Temps in the low hundreds, we would pick four rows on Friday and four on Saturday, using Kmeta and dry ice to keep things under control. Total harvest was 975 pounds. Brix is likely to be in the 27-30 range after typical post pick bounce. Ph was 3.41 - so a little low. We will probably water back, using acidulated water prior to pitching yeast after taking measurements on Monday.
Here’s how we handled the pick - lots of buckets placed into a macro bin on forks on the front of my tractor. Buckets transferred to picking bins in the garage and then returned to vineyard to be filled again. Once all was picked, bins dumped into the crusher destemmer. We all agreed that this saved us a lot of time over dumping buckets into macro bin and then shoveling back into buckets to go into crusher in garage…