A group of my friends (some that also blog) agreed to get up and meet at our house at 6 am on Saturday to pick grapes.  Amazingly, they all showed up early, and had some breakfast then headed out to Fallbrook.  Most of the rest of the gang were already there, so we spent a little more time waking up then started picking.

Unfortunately, there had been a major heat wave the past 2 weeks, and about half of the vineyard was raisined.  We picked mainly plump fruits with a few raisins added, and were done in about 2 hours with the top and bottom vineyards.  We were expecting to take away 1000 pounds, but when we weighed our haul, there was only 242 pounds, including stem weight.  Not great, but the fruit is amazing, and the little bit of wine we’ll get should be outstanding.

We dumped the grapes into the crusher/destemmer, and finished processing them pretty quickly.  Just in time, too, the sun came out and it got very hot very quickly.  Dave and Mike tested the grapes, the must was at 26.5 degrees brix and pH 3.5.  We added some dry ice for a 2-day cold soak, then started the harvest picnic.  It was a fun day, even if we didn’t get quite as much as we had hoped for.