For our family, fall is an exceptionally special time of year. Fall means the grape harvest. The crush.
Anytime between the beginning of September and the end of October, the entire family and a few family friends are on call for the harvest. When the sugars in the grapes are perfect, everyone is expected to drop everything and head to my in-law's in Napa to help in the vineyard. Our vineyard is small, we'll just call it 100 vines. Small, but mighty.
The fateful call came mid week last week and early Saturday morning we found ourselves making the short drive up to the valley. {I'm just going to be real here. I'm thanking my lucky stars the call didn't come this week meaning we would be harvesting with a house full of people on my anniversary weekend. As much as I love the harvest, I am not cool with it taking the place of anniversary fun.}
We knew ahead of time that we were going to have a lot of grapes this year. More than we've ever had before so we called in some reinforcements and planned to do a dinner afterwards to thank everyone for helping. By Sunday everyone was exhausted but relieved to have everything done so early in the season.
I didn't get many pictures of the de-stemming process but that took us the longest. We dump all of the grapes onto two tables, pour some glasses of wine, and get really dirty. Pulling the grapes apart is a messy job and I didn't want to get my pretty camera all dirty but I did snap an Instagram photo or two.
By far, the best part of the entire process is the crushing of the grapes. Since we don't have thousands of pounds of grapes to deal with, we get to crush them the old fashioned way... with our feet! {Don't worry we bleach ourselves sterile first.}
Saturday night my FIL bottled all of last years wine. It was super tasty and fun to watch. He usually bottles when none of us are around to bug help him.
Happy Harvest!
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