Preparing For Bottling

Today we cleaned 27 cases of bottles, preparing to bottle the 09 cabernet, including some magnums that Bob brought.  Took us about 3 hours.  We tried using one-step this time and liked it.  We think it has some sanatizing properties if the bottles soak for a couple of minutes...although it still isn't clear.  We got some  little sponges and ran them through the large siphon line and the bottling hose, using water pressure. We liked how that worked to clean out the lines.  And we soaked the bottler in a bucket of one-step, so it is ready to go (we will still want to do a quick meta rinse).

 

Blending trials are set for Wed at 6:30pm followed by bottling on Thu at 5:30pm.  This time we're going to pull barrel samples a couple of hours ahead of time so they have time to warm up before blending.  Each of the small carafes holds about 2 cups, or 500ml.  We will probably need 2 full carafes each of the ID and WA cabs plus 1 carafe of the Malbec

 

Inventory of wine in the garage is listed below. I counted fewer gallons of the 2009 wine than expected.  I expected about 60 gallons of 2009 wine and found only 32 gallons (15G of WA Cab and 17G of ID Cab), so I must have missed some. I will go back and double check. Maybe there is another stainless keg with combined 2009 ID/WA cab?  I did double check the corks and we have 300-400 corks, which will be enough.

 

We are tight on extra gallons of some of the 2010 wines, which we need to think about for racking. No extra Malbec and only 1G of WA Merlot (I didn't count any wine in Platypus containers).  We will have to figure out a racking plan.

 

 

Cooler #1:

1. 30G Hungarian, 2010 ID Syrah

2. 22G French, 2010 WA Cabernet

3. 22G French, 2010 WA Syrah

4. 15-18G American, 2010 Idaho Merlot

 

Cooler #2:

1. 15G Hungarian, 2010 WA Cabernet

2. 15G French, 2010 ID Cabernet

3. 15G Stainless, 2009 WA Cabernet

4. 15G Stainless, 2009 ID Cabernet

 

Carboys:

- (1+ 3+5) 9G 2010 WA Syrah

- 3G  2010 ID Merlot

- (5+1+ 5+1) 12G 2009 ID Cabernet

- 1G 2010 WA Merlot

- 3G ID Syrah

 

Cooler #3:

1. 30G French, 2010 WA Syrah

2. 30G Hungarian, 2010 Malbec

3. 26G American, 2010 WA Merlot

4. 30G American, 2010 WA Merlot