Marquette Harvest

Good Morning! Bright and early on a Friday morning, I get to the vineyard on a beautiful sunny day, totally ready to cut off the fruit that I've been worrying about for the past... 5 months? Geez. Marquettes, we've had some great times together, but it's time to go.

The first order of business is getting the netting off. It has been on the vines for a few months now and the Marquettes are so vigorous that there are new shoots coming out everywhere, tendrils pulling on the netting, leaves everywhere pushing through so wrestling the netting free of the vines was going to be a chore.



But thankfully John the handy mechanic (the guy drinking coffee) rigged up a netter-get-offer that hooked up to the tractor which worked incredibly well. Granted, we still had to use one guy on either side of the vines and one guy feeding the netting on the spool and picking leaves and branches out of the netting, but I can't even imagine how hard it would have been to do by hand without his contraption.



The grape clusters were small to medium and they were somewhat hidden in dense foliage. It would have been completely impossible to harvest had we not combed them twice and thinned off the side shoots and leaf pulled... and even after all that, it was still a treasure hunt.

I was trying to make a chart of the samples that I took of the Marquettes starting at the beginning of September, but all my numbers were pretty much the same - 3.15pH, TA around 10, and Brix around 23. Even my harvest numbers came out just like that pH 3.15; TA 10.3; Brix 23.5; so my line graph was pretty much flatline. We certainly let them hang on the vine a long time and the book I read said we should be fine as long as the pH didn't spike, which it never did. Towards the end, about in the final week of them hanging on the vine, they started getting attacked by everything. The birds took a lot off before we got the netting off, the frost wiped out a whole section of vines, and then in the end we had quite a few foes attacking the clusters.

We experienced a lot of rot when it got down to it and I'm glad we didn't wait another week. Next year, I'll mark the harvest for the middle of September when the numbers get around 3.15pH, 10 TA, and Brix of 23. The flavor didn't change much in the last few weeks, but then again possibly it would change the flavor of the wine.

Now I'm looking at the Frontenac numbers, which are the next batch to go and they look like they are moving in the right direction for harvest next weekend.


In the end, we got one ton off an acre of three year old grapes, which I guess isn't too bad and I hope I didn't push the vines so much that they won't come back next year. It's been such a weird season with a cool summer, almost a month of August drought, a late frost that wiped out half the buds, and ravenous birds that almost took a whole row out. I'm buttoning up my garden, just shaking my head at another weird Ohio growing season, thankful for what did grow and produce.