Week 21 (Nov. 11 - 15th)

Three coolers of grape samples from vineyards around the state arrived this week. All the grapes were frozen, so we first had to let them defrost. I next crushed the samples by hand and pressed them out with the little press on the right. We collected two tubes of each sample.

I recorded the brix, TA and pH for each sample. This kept me busy for the greater part of a day.

The wine cellar is filling up! I am clinitesting, racking, and adding sulfites to roughly five or six batches per day.

The end of the week finally warmed up enough for us to start and finish pinning down all the j-vines. We also were able to dig up the nursery, a task which we had been delaying for the past few weeks in order to allow the ground to dry out and warm up. This project was important to get done before a hard frost, as all of last year's crosses (some being cold-vulnuerable) were planted in the nursery for this growing season. We used an under-cutter, which was attached to the back of a tractor, to pry the vines up. We would then collect marked vines (healthy vines with little disease) and organize them in bundles. We discarded the majority of the nursery, maybe 70%, as these underperformed and/or had genetics that were susceptible to diseases. We moved all the bundles to a cellar, where they were burried in peat in order to remain dormant until spring.