It only took us one day to harvest our grapes, with some helpers, a perfect day and an early start! We alternated between picking and crushing, then cleaning up – and started over. In a way, this was a “test” year, since we don’t have that many vines bearing fruit yet.
We started with picking:
Brought everything to the “crush pad” by the barn:
Where we weighed each container – and also weighed some of the larger clusters (some weighed over 1 lbs):
We used our cider press – minus the actual press part – for crushing the grapes, and the we manually did the de-stemming. In addition to pulling out all the stems, we were also paying close attention to spiders, stink-bugs and all sorts of other critters. We were closely on the look-out for Asian lady bugs (the yellow kind), but did not find a single one.
The crushed berries were dumped into one of our fermenters:
