I got a call in early from Scott at Thatcher Bay in Livermore early in May or so asking if I wanted grapes. It was the first time a vineyard called me for sales, cool! A few months later, I found out the market for grapes dropped and everybody was hustling to get buyers. Perhaps I could have ventured out and got other grapes from another source and gotten a deal, but I like these grapes so I took the deal. Maybe I’ll consider this info for next year ….

September 28th, 2024
I got 1107# of Merlot for $1.10 per pound. Colin (and his truck) weren’t available, so I used my SUV. Maaaaaaybe I could have killed myself (and my car) and put all the grapes in my car in one load, but I didn’t want to do that. I decided to do the easy thing and just take two trips and have my car ~75% at capacity each time. My dad came with me, we left my house promptly at 7am to get the first load of grapes at 8am.

An open bed truck is super helpful, and that was missed. But a close second is a pitch fork. It is sooooo easy to move grapes with a small pitch fork. We put half the grapes in totes with two pitch forks pretty easily and were on our way back home. I thought about stashing them somewhere so as to get the second half of grapes quicker, but I didn’t have a good place to store them! So I crushed them right when we got home which was pretty easy. The shaft locked up with no use for a year, so I had to grab a paddle to shake it free. We were quickly back to get the second half of grapes and processed those.

We didn’t really work to go fast, I’d say we did 4 x 45 min trips. Pickup was a leisurely 20 min each time, and crushing and destemming was 30 min per load. Then, an hour of cleaning. That got us to 1:30pm or so when we were done. I filled three fermenters and one tote with must. I put 1.25 tsp SO2 per bin. I bought 80g of BM45 yeast and pitched it 24 hours later.

Grape Stats
1107 pounds
25 Brix (probably accurate to +/- .5B)
pH TODO (self measurement)
1.25 tsp SO2 per bin targeting 30ppm

I added half a bag of nutrients at the 1/3rd mark and 2/3rd mark. I added malolactic bacteria 2 days before pressing.

I wasn’t super diligent about measuring Brix through the fermentation, but I was more interested in the temperature. We had an uncanny streak of about 6 days of 100F temperature. I kept my car outside, opened garage doors at night, I took minor steps to keep it not boiling in the garage. I stuck on temperature gauges to the fermentors. I found that the temp peaked in my garage around 87 and the must got to about 90, since it was exothermic. It was also really “thermally massive”, I could quickly change the temp in my garage but the must would lag significantly and move temperature slowly. On Oct 9, the Brix got down to about -1.5 so I decided to press.

October 9th, 2024 – Press Day
We had lighter attendance here, with just my parents and Shae and Jenn. I decided to press in my driveway, instead of my backyard, to minimize hauling. I think this was a good idea. I got some siphons going at 4pm, and then we started pressing at 5:15 and were done at 7. This is a pretty smooth, and easy operation now. Each big fermentor results in one load. There was a slight wrinkle with the extra 100 lbs causing a small headache at the end with a partial load. I pressed the last load and then re-topped off with the last of the must. We finished at 7pm and had dinner. I did some light cleaning of the press, and got everything in the garage by 8 to put the boys to bed. (Again, like last year, going to Berkeley twice in two days for the rental was a big pain, and time-suck, what should I do about this next year???)

I have 4 kegs, 1 carboy, 1 one gallon growler, 1 half gallon growler. I’ll let it settle for some amount of days, and then do the first racking. Done with the hard part!