Harvesting At Gray Ghost

Today we went to Gray Ghost Vineyards to help harvest the chardonnay grapes. We do this every year and have been for the last 12 years. They had a bumper crop this year. Al Kellert reported bringing in almost 50% more than they did last year. We had a great time as usual! Here’s what the grapes looked like this morning.

Harvesting Chardonnay

On Saturday we went to Gray Ghost to help harvest the chardonnay. As in past years, we do this every year and always have a great time. Here are some photos from our time harvesting.

We gathered early Saturday morning to harvest the chardonnay.
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Al used his “Powerpoint” presentation to demonstrate how to harvest.
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Amy put on a show to display this years harvest T-shirt.
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Before heading to the vineyard Warren got a chance to talk with Al about the harvest.
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We then headed to the vineyard and got a closer lesson on harvesting.
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Here’s Warren harvesting some grapes.
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After all the lugs were full, Al Jr and helpers collected all the lugs and brought them to the crush pad.
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Here are some of the grapes we were harvesting.
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After all the grapes were brought in, we toasted to this year’s harvest.
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Gray Ghost Harvest

On Sunday we went to Gray Ghost to help harvest the chardonnay grapes. We do this every year and always have a good time. Here are some pictures from the day.

We all gathered very early in the morning.

Al Kellert told us all about the process.

Amy showed us what this year’s T-shirt looked like.

These are the grapes we were harvesting.

Here’s Warren harvesting the grapes.

During a break, Amy reminded us of a few things to remember when harvesting.

Al estimated we brought in more than 10 tons of grapes.

The grapes were put through the de-stemmer.

Then they were fed into the bladder press.

Here’s Al working the bladder press.

When we were all done we had a congratulatory toast.

And this is why we work so hard to harvest the grapes.

Harvesting at Gray Ghost

Yesterday we spent a good chunk of the day at Gray Ghost Vineyards helping to harvest the chardonnay grapes. This has become an annual event for us. This was my 6th year and Warren’s 8th year harvesting. We always have a good time and enjoy meeting new people.

As usual, we got up really early and met others at the winery and enjoyed some breakfast treats before heading out to the vineyards.

Al gave us a quick lesson on how to harvest the grapes.

We then headed out to the vineyards to begin harvesting the grapes.

Here’s Warren hard at work snipping the stems.

We found a small bird nest IN the vines!

A few hours later the lugs were weighed and 11 TONS (yes, tons) of chardonnay grapes had been harvested.

At the end we toasted and cheered for the record breaking harvest and what a good job we had all done! We look forward to repeating this again next year!