2009 Cab moved off wood

3/6/11: We moved the 2009 reserve cab off wood into stainless and glass. We will blend it with a little 2009 malbec and/or merlot in April.  We added 15ppm of meta to offset oxidation from racking.  Lee's 30G French barrel is rinsed and drying.  It needs to be sulfured after drying for a week.

 

We combined a smaller barrel and SS Keg of WA Syrah and put it into Ray's newest American oak barrel and then moved the ID Merlot from SS and glass into the small wood barrel.  We made a point of transferring some sediment/lees for MLF food.  We need to order ML cultures and get that started.  We could use a couple more of the larger "red top" breathable bungs.

 

We topped and checked all wines. All the wines are sound with no sign of HSO2. 

Travel Shock Experiment

There have been numerous discussions in the wine-world about "Travel Shock" impacting the flavor of a wine when it is shipped to you.  Many people recommend waiting several weeks after receiving a wine to allow it to recover.  Individuals in our group have had similar experiences where wine that they drove to a friend's house (many miles) didn't "taste right" to them, so we decided to run a test to see if we could detect travel shock in a bottle of wine. 

 

We took 2 identical bottles of 2009 Encore wine and exposed one to travel shock and left the other one alone. Prior to the experiment, both bottles had been stored exactly the same. The "Travel Shock" bottle then rode to Lewiston (300 miles) on a paved curvy road. It sat outside for a day in near freezing temperatures (while it's owner fished!), and then was driven a couple more hours and taken inside a warm house where it sat for 2 days.  It then drove 270 miles home and was sat upright next to the control-bottle for 66 hours inside a house. Both bottles were opened for an hour and then blind poured to be compared. 

 

Both wines drank just fine and people generally felt they were the same wine. There were some minor differences noted by some for flavor or smell, but nothing consistent or very significant. 

 

Possible Conclusions:

 

1. Travel shock is not real.

2. 66 hours was enough time to recover from travel shock.

3. The type of wine was not susceptible to travel shock, such as no sediment, not aged, not tannic.

 

Based on this limited result we think drinking wine that has been shipped is "safe" after 3 days.  We may look for other opportunities to try similar experiments in the future.

 

Fwd: Bottles and blending

Forwarding white blending/bottling info from Mike.  I will add $100 paid by Lee to this year's expenses for the Riesling.

 

Troy

 

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A gorgeous day!  In about 2 hours, we washed up about 18 cases of non-shouldered bottles in prep for bottling the whites tomorrow starting around noon.  Washing didn't take long due to good precleaning.  Thanks to all of us for doing a better job. 

 

We tried the Reisling and Viogner.  The Reisling has a slight nose of peach, soft finish.  It is Ok by itself.  The Viogner is a cool site Viogner and has little nose; a bit of a tart start with a nice grapefruit finish.  It will go nicely with food.   After tasting 75/25% (both ways) and 50/50% blends, we decided all three blends have merit.  We decided to blend 10 gals each of Reisling/Viogner for 20 gallons of 50/50 blend; 5 gal of Reisling by itself (this one carboy is a bit fizzy)  and 15 gallons of Viogner by itself.   We dumped the container of Reisling marked NO.  It had a bad nose and very poor taste.  We should end up with about 3+ cases of white wine each.  We do need to discuss settling up on the Reisling.  We think Lee purchased it along, since none of the rest of us remember ponying up any $$ to contribute. 

 

We will move the Cabernet into SS and glass within the next few days also.  We will then move the WA Syrah from one 18 gal wood barrel and one 15.5 gal SS keg into a 30 gal wood barrel.  We will also move the Idaho Merlot from the 15.5 gal SS keg + the 4 gal in carboys into the vacated 18 gal barrel now containing WA Syrah leaving a little extra for topping.   We will talk more on the moving and consolidation of wines tomorrow during bottling of the whites.