July 30th Topping Report

We topped up and tasted wines tonight.  Wines were down quite a bit. It's been 3 weeks since we topped last.  Wines are coming along well. Here are some notes from the tasting.

 

Troy

 

The merlot is starting to mellow. It's still a bit astringent and tannic but it has some fruit now. We all thought it was much improved.

 

The syrah is a bit thin and bland.

 

The petite sirah has a candied fruit flavor. Nice body. Clean finish.

 

The syrah/p.sirah blend was a nice combination. It had the fruit from the P. Sirah and the finish from the Syrah. Very promising.

 

A 1G carboy of Petite Sirah smelled and tasted off. We marked its suspect and hit it with a little meta.

 

The malbec continues to be very peppery with some green pepper.

 

Wa Clone 6 cab was OK, but somewhat shut down. Nothing bad, but the flavors aren't showing through right now.

 

The ID Williamson cab in Ray's 30G French barrel had a much bigger nose and flavor than the same cab in the 20G American barrel.

 

The Petite Sirah port had an off flavor and smell. We think it might be getting oxidized. The PH is higher on that wine so it requires more ppm of Meta so we added 15ppm. 

 

Temp in the big cooler was 72 degrees, which is warmer than we would like. We turned the temp down to the max level. We should check the temp in a few days. It's possible that the higher temps are causing the issue with the Petite Sirah and the port.  We didn't have a thermometer in the smaller cooler--we should put one in there to get a reading on temperatures.

 

We need to check Troy's empty barrel and resulfur it. We'll want to check and see if it needs to be hydrated (and then meta/citric rinsed) first.