Yesterday we had 27 wonderful buyers and volunteers here to harvest 3,300 pounds of Petite Syrah grapes. It was VERY hot. 90 at
9 a.m. There are another 600 pounds out there that the buyers will come to pick next Saturday. We were done by noon though and after lunch people left, the last gone by about 2 p.m. We were too tired to nap. How does that work? In fact, I was too tired to eat dinner, and that never happens! I was in bed by 8 p.m. and Norm made himself a bagel with lox and cream cheese.
Being a delicate Canadian flower, it was the heat that got to me naturally. We had an early night, slept very well and are are fine this morning. It’s hot again today, but we’re just puttering with cleaning up and tidying. We’re washing barrels and buckets with a lot of spraying of the cool water and organizing for next weeks continued harvest – 5,000 pounds of Zinfandel. We think we have a couple of buyers coming out midweek to harvest their Zinfandel, at which point we’ll likely do ours too and crush it to start fermenting. We have about 20 volunteers or so coming out Saturday to bring in the rest.
We’re trying not to think about it, but next year we’ll likely have about 8,000 pounds of each variety. But at least we’ll have an Ag building to take shelter from the heat, with a cellar to hold the grapes for our buyers. We plan to sit down next week to analyze what we did right for harvest and what we can improve upon for the comfort, safety and enjoyment of all involved.
Cheers,
Elaine