Harvest week Oct. 8 - 14, The grapes are all in!!!!

Monday, we pressed the Saralee 115 Pinot Noir. The previous week, we got a call from Peter, our grape broker for Stage Gulch, he thought the grapes would be ready sometime this weekend. However, with the forecast of rain for Tuesday there was a scramble to get the grapes picked. The grapes were picked Tuesday morning and were delivered to us on Wednesday afternoon, 9.94 tons. This was such a good thing, since it rained Tuesday night and again on Friday!!!
We lined up several volunteers to help out with the sorting and destemming. The whole process seemed to take a long time, but I think it was just because we were tired from all of the other crushes. We are truly happy to have all of our grapes in.
The Stage Gulch grapes will cold soak for 2 days and then we will inoculate them with yeast. In this time that they are fermenting, about 2 weeks, we do 3 manual punch downs a day, everyday! The yeast are converting sugar to alcohol and give off carbon dioxide which pushes the skins to the top of the bin. We want the skins to be in contact with the juice for maximum color and flavor extraction. So, when we do the punch down we are pushing the skins back into the juice. Check back in next week for more barreling and pressing!