Merlot Crush

We picked up 1,000# of Red Mountain (WA) Merlot today that we were lucky enough to get through Dennis (Thanks Dennis!). The fruit was FANTASTIC! Nice ripeness of the berries, stems and seeds. Flavor was great and there was a good amount of concentrated juice. We are VERY excited to have it in the winery and see what we can do with it.

Dennis had his fruit crushed and checked and it read 28.2 Brix and 3.53 pH--amazing. When we checked ours it came out a solid 30 Brix on the Hydrometer. Dennis stopped by and had a refractometer and it read just under 29. So we'll say it's somewhere between 29 and 30. Our pH meter wouldn't calibrate, so we couldn't check the pH. We'll get a new crystal and check it later but we assume it will be 3.6 or so, based on Dennis' numbers.

The potential alcohol for a 29/30 Brix reading is 16.75-17.5%, which is too high for Pasteur Red yeast. We need to get it down to the 15-16% range to ensure a complete fermentation, plus we've found that when the alcohol gets up that high it makes the wine too hot and unbalanced. So we will discuss ameliorating the wine.

To drop us into the 26-27 brix range we need about 8-12G of water (using the online calculator at: http://vinoenology.com/calculators/chaptalization-and-water-dilution/ that we've used before). We should look at adding the water early in the fermentation cycle so we get more skins exposure (ideally during the cold soak). After crush we estimate we have about 99G of Must. We added 4 TBSP of meta to sanatize the must and will do a cold soak for 2 days and innoculate Friday night or Saturday morning using the Pasteur Red and some GoFerm nutrient.

Photos have been uploaded to the Riverwoods 2010 Wine Photos, at the end of the album.

http://picasaweb.google.com/riverwoodswinery/Wine2010

Troy