Week 18 (Oct. 14 - 18th)

I went on a road trip Saturday to Melrose, MN in order to help John finish harvesting his vineyard.We lugged away 5,000 lbs during the day-long adventure, all of which is being made into wine at the Parley Lake Winery. To conclude and toast the harvest season John "saber-opened" a bottle of champagne, a old tradition of Germany. He used a knife (but traditionally it would have been a sword) to perfectly crack open the bottle top. 

We continue to harvest grapes a the HRC as they continue to ripen and become more palatable. However, grape varieties with thin skins are starting to break down and attract more Asian beetles and wasps! This makes harvesting a slower and more painful process. The chemical in the beetle's hemolymph (orange goo) is supposed to make a wine taste like burnt peanut butter, which apparently is a bad thing. 

We received a few coolers of grapes this week from growers around MN in order to analyze how the chemistry varies between locations (or more specifically soil conditions and cultural practices). I crushed the clusters by hand, collected two viles of the juice for each, and then recorded pH, TA and degrees brix.

As we scour the vineyards for the latest varieties to pick, we are also making sure to find all the breeding bags. These wax-paper bags contain clusters of the grapes which we cross-pollinated by hand back in June. 

Though this project has been on the back-burner for the whole summer, it is the foundation of our breeding program and therefore one of the most important tasks that we will perform each season. We carefully extract the seeds from the pulp, rinse and scarify the seed coats, dry the seeds and rub off leftover sugars, and then count the exact number per cross. Though the seeds all look identical, each has unique and carefully selected genetics that need to be properly recorded. If this part of the process were to be done improperly, the breeding program wouldn't progress for the next two years. The seeds were all counted three times, totaling to a little over 6,000!