Last Crush Of The 08 Season

Ray and Bob went out to Williamsons and got 2,000lbs of cabernet. The fruit was picked that morning and into the afternoon and put into fruit boxes. Approx 20 pounds per box, and 100 boxes! All 100 boxes stacked into Troy's trailer with no problem.

Berries were small size, and smaller clusters. Seeds were evenly brown and stems were turning brown too. The fruit came in with some small leaves mixed into it. We picked them out as well as possible, but quite a few of the smaller pieces ended up in the must. The leaves were mostly dry.

We used the motorized crusher rented from BrewCon, which went fast. We crushed all 2,000lbs in just under 2 hours. Much faster than if we had to use the hand crank crusher.  We did several adjustments on the machine to try and get the crush size right. We may have ended up too small because the grapes were crushed/squashed more than usual which exposed the seeds. It also had a side-effect of more "empty" skins were ejected out with the stems (we estimate 50# of skins went into the trash).

We measured 246G of must total, split into 2 microbins (71G each) and 1 macro bin (104G). Volume of must was calculated using the following formula, which we've used several times now. We added just under 3TBSP of meta to sanatize the microbins and 4TBSP + 1tsp to the larger macrobin.

(Depth In Inches of the Must) *(L X W of microbin which is 43*43) * 7.48 / 12 * 12 * 12

We factored out the constants and simplified the equasion to:

Depth in Inches * 8.0038 = Gallons Of Must

The cabernet sugars were again higher than expected, with the PH coming in higher than we wanted. We sampled each bin and they had slightly different numbers, with an average of around 29 Brix and 3.8PH. We may want to do some acid adjustments on the must, but we agree we want to be cautious as our acid adjustments on the Chard in the past hasn't worked out very well. More investigation and discussion is needed. We will need to switch over again to the EC 1118 yeast to handle the higher alcohol. We might consider starting with the Pastur Red as we like the results--but we will need to have some of the EC1118 to finish the job.

MicroBin 1 29.5 Brix, 3.7 PH

MicroBin 2: 30 Brix, 3.9 PH

MacroBin 1: 28.5 Brix, 3.7 PH

We measured the Brix on the Clone 6, and it was around 3. It was at 10 Brix 3 days ago and will probably go another 4-5 days before the cap falls.

The day before we added 2 more TBSP of nutrient to the merlot, which is fermenting well but still very sweet.

We noticed the Sangio wine in the 5G carboy showed asignificant color gradient. We think the darker color on top is the cabernet that is still fermenting (it had higher sugars) and the lighter red below is the sangio. A very interesting effect. We should take a photo! (Photos from today have been uploaded to our shared online photo album.)