Hot weather early in the week confirmed our pick on Thursday the 24th. That morning I started out early in a rented 12′ Penske into dense fog all the way from SF to Sebastopol. Could barely make out pedestrians on the Golden Gate bridge while driving over it.
Stan’s crew had been picking since 6am when I arrived at about 8:30am. Here’s the first bin already filled, fog still hanging over the vineyard.
Here’s my meager bin, I filled one of these (selectively of course!) to everyone else’s five. The flavors were decent though and I measured the median sugar at about 24 brix.
So it turns out the bins are 48″x44″ and the 12′ truck bed is actually 136″ long — one needs to orient the bins just right to fit three of them. We got it right the second time. Thanks to Stan’s neighbor we had a tractor with the right size picks to deal with the bins.
Made it back to SF to sort and de-stem by 12:30, fruit was in the the cold room for a five-day soak as of 3:00pm. The sort was challenging; the variation in ripeness amongst clusters was significant. That’s Bill W. on the left, trusted friend of Wait Cellars, and Chip, a Crushpad employee working the harvest. The must entered cold soak at 23.9 brix and had risen to 25.3 by Sunday morning.
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