Harvest 2012 - Week 2

The booming of propane run air cannons in the vineyard are a sure sign harvest is close to being in full swing.  The cannons are used in many vineyards to scare away the birds when the grapes ripen.   Some vineyards put nets over their vines to keep the birds out and often that occurs when the wineries are making ice wine as these grapes need to stay on the vines well into the winter.  But birds are not the only creatures that love the taste of ripe grapes.  Deer can also be very good consumers of grapes if they get loose in a vineyard and our resident black bears can eat up a whole row in very short order.  At Blue Mountain we have put an 8ft fence around our vineyards to keep the deer out and as the bears dig under the fencing we have had to electrify the fencing to keep bear damage to a minimum. 

All this to protect the 80 acres of grapes we are using to make our wines.  In the cellar, Matt and the crew have harvested 68 tonnes of fruit to date.  These Pinot Noir, Chardonnay and Pinot Gris grapes have been pressed, pumped into tank and then left to sit for 24 hours.  This lets any particles settle out. The juice is then racked and inoculated with commercial yeast selected from the Champagne region of France.   The majority of this juice will be fermented in tank with only about 10% being barrel fermented in older French oak barrels for approximately 3 months.  The portion in barrel is to add complexity to the sparkling wine. 

  
So that completes our sparkling grape harvest. The crew gets a much deserved rest for the next three days and will be ready to go again on Monday when we start harvesting the Sauvignon Blanc for the table wine off of our Horse Thief high density vineyard for our cream label Sauvignon Blanc. 

A big Blue Mountain welcome and thank you to Lisa Andrews from Rogers & Co in Toronto, Ontario who is helping us this week with the harvest.