It has begun! Today we kicked off our 16th
harvest at James Arthur Vineyards by crushing about 13 tons of
Edelweiss grapes from 3 different growers. Before we pick any grape, we
look at the field brix (sugar level), the pH and the acid in the grape.
All the growers we had in today were ready. We’ll bring in 4 more
growers tomorrow,
and finish up with the rest of our growers next week/weekend. This has
been an interesting year, in that because of the cooler, wet spring,
everything bloomed out a little later than normal, which means we
started harvest just a hair later than we usually do. Also, although 2
of the growers are less than a mile away, our grapes here at JAV aren’t
quite ready, which means we’ll be starting our harvest during the middle
of next week. Usually we use a lot of high school kids for picking, and
since school has already started in Lincoln and the surrounding area,
it could be interesting in how many pickers we’ll get. We’ve already
decided that we’ll do an evening pick next Thursday, which is something we’ve never done here at JAV.
The
crush crew today consisted of myself, my assistant winemaker Justin,
our longtime employee and friend Al, and my son Beau…of 2 Brothers fame.
The weather was perfect for picking and crushing, lots of clouds and
mild temps, makes life a lot easier on all of us, and especially the
grapes. So far, the yields are a little higher than we estimated, so it
looks like it’s going to be a bumper crop of Edelweiss! We also broke
out the new Europress this afternoon…ran like a champ! Took a little
reconfiguring, but it will make us even more efficient on these long
harvest days!
