We pressed the Wood River Malbec and WA Sangiovese last night, Oct 28 2008. Both were fermented out with a soggy cap.
The Malbec was crushed on 10/18 and was on the skins 10 days. Color was immensely dark purple and flavor was very good--maybe the best Malbec we've had at this point. No hint of green flavors this year. We got 48G of Malbec, pressing only lightly, and filled Lee's 30G French barrel, a 15G stainless keg, 2G carboys and 1G platypus.
The Sangio was crushed on Oct 19th, 9 days on the skins. The color was a lighter red color, until the pressed wine which was much darker and had much more flavor. Flavors were a bit under-developed because of the low Brix, but it really picked up a lot of flavor the last couple days of fermentation. The Sangio included about 10G of clone-6 cabernet must that was co-fermented to help increase the low Sangio sugars and add extra flavor from the Cab skins (estimate 10% cab co-fermented).
We got 70G of Sangio wine, more than expected because of the added 10G of cabernet must and we pressed very hard to get more flavors and tannins out of the lighter flavored must (WOW! What a difference in color and flavor.) We put the Sangio into Troy's 15G Hungarian barrel, Michele's 15G hungarian barrel, 2 15G SS kegs, 9G carboys and 1G Platypus. Michele will pick up her barrel and some carboys after the first racking in a week or so.
The Clone-6 Cab cap is starting to be less firm and the color/flavor is fanstastic! We want to keep the wine in contact with skins as long as possible to increase flavor/color/tannins. We moved it into the 2 plastic blue barrels to free the microbins up for Roger's cab that will be coming later this week (ETA Thursday 10/30).
The is Merlot fermenting well now with a very dense cap. Still very very sweet.
No comments:
Post a Comment