Hardscrabble Journal

Regroup

The first big push is over. Bottom line is that we picked and pressed all the grapes that were ripe before the onset of Irma. We have some very nice white wines fermenting. But what happened to Irma? We were lucky as Irma fell apart before impacting our area. Looks like a few showers today and tomorrow, but nothing that will have any substantial impact on the grapes still on the vines. Today I’ll walk the vineyard and take grape samples for lab analysis. Next up to bat will be rose. Merlot to follow in a week or two.

As is always the case after a long, intense crush run, the cellar is disheveled to put it mildly. Nice to have a couple of days to put things together. After lots of cleaning and re-wiring, we should have our old destemmer back in action by tomorrow. This old guy has no electronics to fry. I hate having equipment that I can’t fix, a lesson I seem to need to learn over and over again.

The silver lining is that plan B worked remarkably well. With no destemmer for the last two crush days, we whole cluster pressed Avenius Chardonnay and Sauvignon Blanc along with some Hardscrabble Chardonnay. The juice quality was excellent along with juice yields (the volume of juice coming from a ton of grapes was up about 5%). Nice to have this as an option.

Linden Vineyards / Learn More / Latest at Linden | Journal: September 13, 2017