Harvest 2023 Begins
The long-awaited start to the 2023 Northern Hemisphere harvest is finally here! On Wednesday of this week, we harvested our first grapes of 2023: our Chardonnay from the Central Coast.
They started picking fruit at 4am to get these beautiful clusters into the winery bright and early.
Once the clusters came to the winery, into the press they went! Through the use of a crusher/destemmer machine, half-ton bins of fruit went into the hopper, which catches the fruit, down into the destemmer and directly into our press.
When we work with white wines, we press the juice off the skins right away in order to get all of the juice from the flesh.
After pressing all the juice, it goes to sit in the tank and stay cool. Then we measure the sugar levels using our density meter.
Here you can see that our brix (sugar level) is at 23.4. The ideal range for white wines is between 23 and 24.5 brix, so we hit the nail on the head with this one!
Brix helps us learn about the conversion of sugar to alcohol. With this level of brix, we’re looking at a finished product of about 13% ABV.
Once all of this is settled, we let the wine sit at a cold temperature until we’re ready to inoculate it.
We’re about ready to start fermentation, so we’ll let you know when we get the ball rolling! But so far, this is an excellent start to our 2023 vintage. Next up is our 2023 Estate Sauvignon Blanc, so check us out and follow along on Instagram!
Hope you learned a little something. We look forward to tasting with you soon!
Cheers,
Amanda