SHINE ON, HARVEST MOON!

It's that time of year, and like so many of the other wineries, we're making wine! This is one of many small crushes and pressings we've been doing over the last few weeks. We've been crushing lots of baco noir (one of our big wines for 2009), noiret, and some small amounts of experimental grapes - clones and such from Cornell. As well as other grapes. We're bringing in twice as much Seyval and DeChaunac as last year.

You can see our Farm Manager Ralph Cooley pressing grapes while many of use attend to other chores. We photographed many of the more photogenic scenes. The one of me lifting the wheel barrel with the left over pummace and stems and bringing it to the back of the farm to dump for compost somehow didn't make it into the galley included here.

After the grapes have masserated for sometime (letting the juices and skins sit together for a period) we press the soupy, sweet mixture, which is part alcohol and part sugar, and separate the juice form the skins.

The skins, once they have been separated from the juice are now called pummace. It makes for great fertilizer or compost. That's solid pressed grapes with the juice squeezed out.

Wine is then collected into small batches.

And then we'll start consolidating and consolidating until we end up with hundreds of gallons of it. The all the baco noir will be aged in French oak barrels for a minimum of six months.