Chateau Michaelena Vineyard

Winemaking Talk - Winemaking Forum

Help Support Winemaking Talk - Winemaking Forum:

This site may earn a commission from merchant affiliate links, including eBay, Amazon, and others.
It's always something. Hopefully you'll recover some fruit from that. It looks like some of your clusters were not damaged.

Good luck.
 
This hit sorta late in the evening for a Monsoon with hail like after 9:00PM.

Every time I go out there I see more and more damage to clusters……. :(

I just bought a nice color pot of Petunias for the front portal and it was shredded this AM.

The Geraniums on the South (back side) of the house were sparred due to the angle of the hail as it came in from the NW mostly.

This is definitely becoming a labor of love/hate LOL
 
Shiny new addition to the winery! Fits perfectly underneath my (now) MOTORIZED crusher destemmer! :sm

Ooohhhh NICE! Almost time to get it all dirty!

I got to destem by hand yesterday and then used my fists to crush the small amount of grapes I was able to harvest. I'm going old school.
 
I (once) de-stemmed close to 200lbs by hand. Even with my wife helping it took us over 8 hours. Never again. LOL
 
This hit sorta late in the evening for a Monsoon with hail like after 9:00PM.

Every time I go out there I see more and more damage to clusters……. :(

I just bought a nice color pot of Petunias for the front portal and it was shredded this AM.

The Geraniums on the South (back side) of the house were sparred due to the angle of the hail as it came in from the NW mostly.

This is definitely becoming a labor of love/hate LOL

We have gotten hit by a few Monsoons in Phoenix over the last couple of weeks. Even had one with some small pea sized hail. However since I used paper bags to prevent the birds from getting to my grapes the bags also seemed to protect the clusters from the hail. So I guess I lucked out.
 
I (once) de-stemmed close to 200lbs by hand. Even with my wife helping it took us over 8 hours. Never again. LOL

Holy Cow! I had maybe 5lbs and it took me almost 15 minutes. I couldn't imagine doing 200lbs by hand!
 
Pic of the (now) Motorized Crusher Destemmer on the new stand. A retired mechanical engineering buddy of mine found an old treadmill motor in great condition in the landfill and pulled out the motor and controls. He then machined the flywheel which has a serpentine belt. He manufactured a cover, somehow got my logo on it, installed cotter keys to remove the setup during cleanup and delivered it all the way to me from Las Cruces 300 miles away. Needless to say I sent him home with plenty of wine!

noname.jpg
 
Glowin,

200 pounds by hand?? Seriously? How long did that take?


Nice destemmer. The only thing that I would suggest is that you fashion some sort of cover for those gears. Just imagine if you got a figure stuck in there!
 
You are absolutely correct. It does need a cover of sorts!

The only thing that I would suggest is that you fashion some sort of cover for those gears. Just imagine if you got a figure stuck in there!
 
Last edited:
Bird Pressure Year to Year

Last year the Robin's tore into what little crop I had and the grapes were just a week or two into verasion. This year we have had a boatload of rain compared to last Summer and we are a week or more further along and there is no sign of any Robin's. I went ahead and netted this week but it sure is weird as I don't know where they went or if they are just so fat and full they don't have to look for food with all this rain but it is sure 180 degree difference.

With a little luck perhaps I will get a couple of gallons. LOL :db
 
Last edited:
We have had so much rain up here that I ended up with black rot in my vineyard
 
Back
Top