This is our harvester. It does a really good job of separating the ripe grapes from the vines and leaves and leaving the unripe grapes on the vines. The goal is to keep material other than grapes out of the grapes that are sent to the wineries. That extra stuff is called MOG or “material other than grapes”. The MOG can reduce the quality of the wine, so we work towards not having any mixed in with our grapes.

The only problem is that we are having problems this year getting our harvester to perform properly. We had two different friends loan us their harvester during the last week when they weren’t using theirs. Thank you, thank you.

Little parts come out of our harvester …

Little parts get overnighted from California … but it still wasn’t working so …

We leased this harvester from California. After this harvester arrived, they loaded up our harvester and hauled it to California so that a skilled mechanic can look at it.


This harvester has two big arms for moving the grapes into bins. My guys like this, so they have already decided to either convert ours to two arms or maybe get a new one with two arms.


Here you can see the grapes going from the harvester …

into a bin being pulled by a trailer.


That’s why we have all the little tractors lined up to haul bins.



We have different kinds of trailers.


Even this one that Cliff and some of the guys modified yesterday afternoon. A little metal and a little welding, and it’s ready. I am sure there is some gray tape on there somewhere. The trailer then hauls the grapes to a near-by winery or…


We put them into a big refrigerated truck to take the grapes to a winery a little farther off.


I guess sometimes some of the other equipment like this forklift act up at times also.

They’ll get it running sometime soon, but we still would like an easier way to get the bins into the trucks, so we’re putting a ramp in at the barn. The area has to be dug out first.



After the ramp is put in, we’ll tear out this wind break wall that is attached to the barn.

Today the guys started on the first stages of the concrete work.

Can’t believe this much work is actually going on during the day since harvest went through the night last night and it will start again this evening.

But I guess it is still all so exciting that we keep going. For example we had a plot of Vermentino that we thought would be a light crop. We harvested twice as many grapes as we were expecting from that plot. The clusters of grapes were the same as we had expected, but the berries themselves had grown huge and sweet in just the last week or so. Can’t wait till we can relax with a glass of the fruit of our labors and rest a little. But that will come in it’s own time. Now is time to work.


Blessings,

Betty

Similar Posts