harvest day 3 – 24-sept-2016

Update 25.9.2016(24.9.2016)billn

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 In the hot, early harvest of 2015, the pinot gris was rarely ripe at (pinot) harvest time. But in this vintage it has kept pace with the chardonnay and pinot noir – above from Beaune Les Avaux today…

Today starts a Côte de Beaune day, and finishes as a Côte de Nuits day.

We start with Santenay 1er Le Comme. We do this parcel every year, and usually it needs quite a bit of triage, but this year, in 5 pallets of grapes I saw only 1 cluster with a little rot – remarkable! What we did have, was ripe grapes with quite ripe stems too – what did require triage, however, was the ‘grilled’ i.e. completely dry, raisined grapes – this is sometimes harder work than snipping out the rot, but I have to say – very good stuff vs the average from these vines.

Next a sight to make us very sorry – the total harvest from Beaune Les Avaux and Beaune Les Cras required just 30 minutes work! The grape quality was super, but the harvest yield was probably below 5 hl/ha…

A short pause, waiting for the truck, and then came our Gevrey-Chambertin villages – quite a lot of it! Two lieu-dits worth, with another coming on Sunday – this to wait in the cooled truck for Monday. Really all the grapes this year have been ripe – very little under-ripe to throw away – and with crunchy thick skins too. The only complaint you could have is the amount of ‘grilled’ berries to remove. About one-third of this Gevrey went through triage and then was left as whole clusters.

Saturday was also a day that some attacked their Corton Grand Crus – according the Carel Voorhuis “The quality looks really good, and to be honest, in the context of the vintage as a whole, I have to be happy with the roughly 25 hl/ha that we managed to harvest.” David Croix (who Carel will soon replace at Camille Giroud) was a little more downbeat about his harvest at Domaine des Croix “The quality looks great, but there simply isn’t enough. I’m still waiting for my Corton-Charlemagne, but the rest is all done, and the domaine as a whole made only 5 HL/ha – the Corton-Charlemagne won’t materially change that.” I will add my own exclamation mark to that!
 

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There are 2 responses to “harvest day 3 – 24-sept-2016”

  1. musignymike@gmail.com25th September 2016 at 5:26 pmPermalinkReply

    A pallet is= to how many kilograms?

    • billn26th September 2016 at 7:18 amPermalinkReply

      The weight of a pallet is 25kg 🙂 (Joke!)

      A pallet of fruit is normally 4×3 cases of fruit – with about 15-18kg of fruit in each case – so let’s say roughly 200kg of fruit per pallet.
      (The example below has fewer cases per pallet, but only because the yield was lower than expected and that’s how it fit on 2 pallets)

      Depending on the ‘cleanliness’ of the grapes (i.e. how perfect the grapes are), triage of each case of fruit takes between 5 and sometimes more than 10 minutes. This year we are (so-far) closer to 5 minutes…

      dsc01219

  2. musignymike@gmail.com27th September 2016 at 8:14 pmPermalinkReply

    We here use 1/2 ton Macro Bins (454 Kg) and use Optical Tirage units,if they can afford them or they rent them,or if not and they have the labor do it manually. Many of the small wineries,5000 or less cases rent everything including equipment or share it. The only thing they really own is the cooperage!

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