Day Eight: Saturday September 1st

The Barbera Harvest

Behind my house I have a cavernous unfinished building that the previous owner used to store his boat.  You know what they say, one man's boat garage is another woman's winery.  We currently have a one ton stainless steel fermentor, a half ton bin and the de-stemmer set up there (pictured).  Also a 30 gallon brute on wheels and several buckets.

The tank was last used (and cleaned) over a year ago.  I hopped in to scrub with Peroxy Carb (Sodium percarbonate), a miracle oxidizing cleaning agent.  Then a quick rinse with Citric Acid, to neutralize all the base we use.  This gets the tank clean but to sanitize we rise with PAA (peracetic acid).  PAA sanitizes by disrupting the microorganism's cell membrane.  It may be home winemaking, but we clean like professionals.

Having learned from the white wine endeavor, this time I called back up to help tackle the ton of Barbera.  I invited 3 very good friends and Todd invited his dad.  Chelsea, Dan and Alison (the photographer).  They are verygood friends because they all work in the wine industry and they took their day off from winemaking to come make wine at my house.

 

Here you can see Chelsea's hand feeding individual clusters underneath the rollers so that the fruit can be de-stemmed but not crushed, otherwise the fruit would be going between the rollers.  But that is a dumb way to do it and I don't know why they even make crusher/destemmers.  Dan's arm is cranking the gears that turn the de-stemmer.

Since feeding one cluster at a time is painfully slow work, we got Todd's dad on the other side to slip in clusters under the rollers.  Without compromising quality, you want to process the fruit as quickly as possible.  Get it out of the picking bin and into the tank.

Chelsea and Todd's dad are feeding clusters through either side.  Dan is operating hand crank on the destemmer, and Todd is collecting the whole berries that are falling into the bottom of the bin.  

Todd is scooping the berries from the bottom of the bin with a plastic beaker into a 5 gallon bucket.

Ideally one would de-stem directly into the tank (or other fermenting vesel).  But because of how tall the tank is, we couldn't put the de-stemmer on top of it.  Fortunately Todd is also tall.  So we de-stemmed into a bin on the floor and bucketed into the tank.

This picture only slightly exaggerates how tall Todd is and how tiny I am.  It reminds me that we are a good team.  He can reach over tall things, and I can get inside them.

It took us about 2 hours to get through the fruit.  It was so great to have so many people around.

My job was to collect the stems that were coming out of the de-stemmer and dump them in the yard waste bin.  It's not a pleasant job because it means you get sprayed with juice and then the bees are more attracted to you.

I'm keeping this picture because it's the only one with Alison in it.  I'm going to pretend she did this on purpose to be a part of the memories.

The stems from one ton of Barbera fit into the standard yard waste bin.  But it didn't get collected for several days so it smelled awful.  The hazards of home winemaking.

Todd, me, Chelsea, Dan.

The de-stemmed berries in the tank.

Tank lid.

After processing the fruit we had a nice BBQ and lots of wine and beer to celebrate.  My friends are the best.

We have more days of harvesting coming up, anyone want to come over?!

-L