We crushed 3 tons of Cayuga White grapes on Sunday morning, and this morning we woke up and did it all over again with a bit over 4 tons of Chardonel grapes from Charleville Vineyard. Here’s a few pics from today:
There’s Clyde setting up the ‘pomice’ bin, where we will throw the grape stems into once the grapes have been destemmed.
And there is Jeff raking the grapes from the bin into the destemming machine. Each bin holds about 1/2 ton of hand-harvested grapes.
This hose is connected to a pump that is pumping the grapes from the destemmer into the press.
And finally, there is our clean-up crew! Hee hee. Jude’s looking for some yummy sweet grapes that might have dropped onto the ground after everything is loaded. We have about an hour left, so I’m headed back to help with the last load now. Cheers!
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I just had my first day ever harvesting grapes and all that stuff. It was really fun. We started picking at about 8am, and got done with the nortons at about noon. after lunch I got to help run the destemmer and then I got to sit on the ladder and hold the hose and watch everything get pumped into the big stainless vat. It was a really exciting and interesting experience.