Harvest & Crush

Probably the most frequent question I get about growing my own grapes is "Wow, how do you harvest all those grapes?!?" And it always bugs me a little bit . . . harvest is THE easiest part of keeping up a vineyard. And it's fun, especially when you get lots involved in picking.

I should add: it's fun when you have a small vineyard like ours. I've seen those commercial guys and gals work non-stop during the crunch time here in Northern California - long tedious hours!

Here we are at Don's place, our neighbor that has been growing Cab Sauvignon grapes a LOT longer than we have. We showed up in the morning with those 5-gallon paint buckets that you can get at any hardware store. Then you pick - snip the clusters, hear them 'thunk' as you gracefully drop them in the bucket, and repeat until you get the 200 lbs or so you want.

From there, if you're from olden times you mash up the grapes with your feet - 'crushing' them such that the juice will come in contact with yeasts and they'll start to ferment. Nowadays, the guys at UC Davis say that all you need to do is puncture the skin of a grape, and in fact the wine comes out better if you don't do all that stomping (sad, I know) - so most use a device called a crusher de-stemmer. Grape clusters go in the top hopper, you turn a crank and grape slurry comes out the bottom. By slurry I mean the grapes, their skins, juice, seeds, and maybe 5-10% of the stems. The other 90-95% of the stems get pushed out through another part of the machine. Amazing! Especially after doing this by hand in our own backyard.

We then packed the grape goo back into those clean/sterilized paint buckets, loaded them in the Matrix and brought them back to our garage to turn into wine!