A busy day at the winery, but we had LOTs of help.
Cheryl drove over to Walla Walla on Saturday and picked up Cabernet from RiverRock Vineyard. We got about 600#. Fruit was tasty but seeds and stems are a little bit greener than normal. Chemistry came in great: 26+ Brix and Ph 3.6-3.7. We crushed it and with a small nick and cleaned up as many stems from the must as we could. We'll limit the skins time this year to keep from extracting the green flavors.
The Merlot has been fermenting for 18 days and was down to about 1 Brix with a soggy cap. We pressed it and got 85G of wine. That's about a 75% yield, remembering that we added about 10G of water to reduce the brix. It is in a 30G Hungarian and 28G American oak plus carboys. We'll rack it off the gross lees in about a week.
The WA Syrah had been in a cold soak for 4 days. It is also running high on Brix (28.5) so we added about 10.5G to reduce the Brix to 26 Brix (14.5% alcohol). We inoculated it with Pasteur Red yeast and GoFerm. This is the first time we've used the bulk yeast so it took some time to figure out the measurements. We estimate a 5 gram package of yeast has about 1 1/8 tsp which is good for 5G of must. So for the 105G of Must we added about 8 TBSP of yeast.
Several empty barrels have a strong VA (nail polish remover/acetone) smell. We've ordered more ProxyCarb to clean them up.
Pictures are uploaded to our Picasa album:
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