The Yakima Valley Washington harvest was beautiful this year. It started a little slow, but made up for it and then some. We picked our 38 year old vine Chenin blanc on Oct. 18th, under clear, cool skies. The brix was perfect, at 21.5. We'll make over 300 cases this year, alot more than the 80 cases last year! Being in a new winery, though, we had a few interesting challenges. Namely, no press. Next door at the Carlton Winemaker's Studio, however, there IS a press. So the challenge was to get 5.2 tons of grapes across the street to CWS, press it, then get the juice back across the street to the winery without the use of a big truck. What did we use? Yes, the Ford F-150 pictured above being loaded with 800 lbs of grapes, 13 trips.
Much to our surprise it worked. Ford tough for sure.
About 9 hours later we had to load the pressed juice back onto the same truck to get it back to the winery. We put 400 gallons of juice in a flexitank on the back of the truck. 4000 lbs. No one knew what would happen. Here's a pic of it being loaded:
Much to our surprise it worked. Ford tough for sure.
A huge thank you to the nice people at The Carlton Winemakers Studio, especially Lance and Cameron, who put up with us using their press all day and into the night.
The wine will be released in the Spring of 2012.
Cheers,
Mike
