Chronicles of the Long Shot Farm - Page 24 of 110 - The Winery at the Long Shot Farm

Another Glorious Rainbow

Posted on October 2, 2016

Maybe our farm’s tagline should be “we grow rainbows”

Grape Harvest Sequence

Posted on October 1, 2016

Yesterday we picked the last of our grape variety, the Vidal Blanc. We should have harvested them 4 days earlier, because the birds got the majority of the grapes in just the last few days 🙁

Here is this year’s chronological grape harvest:

Concord
Chardonnel, at 21° Brix and a pH of 3.06
Corot Noir
Chambourcin harvest part 1, for making Rosè, at 19.9° brix and a pH of 3.31
Chambourcin harvest part 2, for red wine, 22° Brix, and pH of 3.47
Vidal Blanc, 20.6° Brix and pH of 3.33

Our first Corot Noit harvst turned out to be rather sparse. Not only was it the first year that the vines were producing, but we had pruned a lot of clusters off to ensure the vines stayed healthy through the dry summer conditions. But on top of all that, we had major bird damage – the story of our 2016 harvest season.

For these grapevines, we had used black netting, since it is a lot more aesthetic to look at – sadly, the black netting was completely useless.

We picked just enough grapes to end up with 2.5 gallons of must (we had been hoping for ten times that much). Since we had so few grapes, we destemmed them manually, and then crushed them by hand.

We let fermentation run its course, punched down the cap every day, and ended up with 1.5 gallons of wine. We’ll see how it turns out in about a year. For 2017 we are hoping for a full barrel!