Sunday Crush

Sorry to not post sooner…..we had problems crushing on Sunday, and that spread a lot of the cleanup work into yesterday.  Needless to say, I’m just recovering and catching up today!

We ended up crushing just over 8 tons of Cayuga White grapes from Kingdom of Calloway Vineyard up in Fulton.  The first half of the day went relatively easily and we processed our first set of six bins without issues. Unfortunately, the second half of the day went a LOT slower.

I guess we wore out our tractor, because by the second bin in the afternoon, it decided not to lift anymore.  Fortunately, our neighbors, the Earharts, came to our rescue with their tractor!  We processed another bin, then our pump clogged up, so that took some time to figure out.  And of course the second half of the grapes would not all fit into the press, so we had to press out some juice before we could process the last bin of grapes. We started processing at 9am, and finished processing at 9pm, leaving the cleanup for yesterday.  I can tell you that I don’t think my bed has ever felt better!

Anyways, here’s a pictorial recap of Sunday (and my thanks to Terry for taking most of these photos):

There’s Clyde at the beginning of the day loading the first bin of grapes onto the bin dumper (with our tractor).  Bob is on the ground guiding him into place.

And once the bin was in place, we all took a look around to make sure everything was hooked up correctly.

Wheee…..there goes the first load of grapes into the crusher!  Hope the dumper holds up all that weight!

The view from above.  Clyde is operating the handle that tips the bin over.  The grapes don’t all come out completely so you see Bob at the lower right is using a rake to encourage the rest of the grapes into the destemmer.

Once destemmed and crushed, the grapes are then pumped into the yellow press.  Once the press is full (it holds about four tons of grapes when it’s full), we close the doors and turn it on.  As it rotates, two plates on the inside press all the juice out of the grapes. The juice is collected in the pan below, then pumped into tanks downstairs in our cellar.  Here, Clyde and Bob stop for a moment to talk and plan for the second half of the day.  Little did they realize what was to come.  Mmmwahahahahahaha!

While they babysat the press, I went to work cleaning out bins.  We like to get the juice and the extra pieces of skin, leaves, etc., rinsed out of the bins and cleaned up right away.  If we wait too long, well, let’s just say the grape juice is an effective glue!

After the bins were cleaned up, Clyde moved them all out of the way to get ready for the next batch of 6 coming.  Those arrived about 1pm.

Finally, there is the borrowed tractor that saved the day.  There I am on the right, wondering if I’m going to have to call our neighbors and tell them we are not giving them back their tractor.  heheh  It was a powerful machine (Clyde spent a few minutes yesterday finding out how much they cost…..I think he was almost sad to find out that our tractor is back to normal)!

Well, Sunday was one of the hardest first-day-of-crush we’ve experienced for several years.  The good news though is that the bin dumper sure does save a LOT of work, just as anticipated.  Now if everything else would just coorperate, we’d be on easy street!  Hah!

I cleaned the press yesterday, and Clyde spent the evening filtering the juice.  Then he inoculated it with yeast and today it’s fermenting away.  Smells pretty good so far!  Now for a nap……

Hope everyone out there had a great weekend, and that you can come for a visit soon!  Cheers!