Harvest - Day 1

With 14’ U-haul truck ready we left the HD Wines world domination HQ at 5am. Our harvest troop was Monika, Robyn, Scott and Michael. We started with the upper block of Syrah which bird nets were placed. There was still a whole lot of fruit we had to leave because of the uneven ripening. A lot of issues with the fruit were caused by over growing where the clusters were too close and picked up some mold or took some of the energy away from its neighbors. After careful picking we ended with 13 tubs of Syrah and a few tubs of Sangiovese.

When the grapes started getting warm, we got out of there and made it back by 11:30. Once we got back and started cranking on the crusher/destemmer we noticed that we needed to do some on the fly sorting while feeding the crusher. After getting through all the Syrah we had filled about 80% of the 78 gallon flextank with it plus was able to fill another 20 gallon container with the last of it and a small portion of Sangiovese that was left. I then proceeded to sulfite everything with 4 grams of sulfite in the winepod containing 15 gallons of Sangiovese, 5 grams in the 20 gallon bucket containing the Syrah/Sangiovese, 8 grams in the flextank holding the Syrah.

Around 6pm we were finished with the crush and the cleaning took another 3 hours. Just before quitting for the day I did the final must measurements and they came in as follows:

Syrah – Flextank:

Brix 21, pH 3.46 (ratio 251.40)

Sangiovese – WinePod

Brix 22, pH 3.40 (ratio 254.32)

Syrah / Sangiovese blend – Brute

Brix 23, pH 3.54 (ratio 288.22)

So unfortunately the Syrah as a little light on the sugar but was pretty well balanced from an acid perspective. Some papers I have read seem to indicate that pH squared times brix should be between 220-260 for a good balance.