Friday, August 16, 2013

Harvest 2013 - Day 1

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!

Hopefully the rest of harvest will go as smooth as today…we’ll keep you posted!

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