WA Grapes Crushed

Mike picked up the WA grapes on Sunday and drove them back to Boise. We got 625lbs of Sangiovase from Quality Nursery in Zillah and 500+lbs of Clone-6 Cabernet from RiverRock vineyard near Walla Walla. Quality Nursery packaged up the Sangiovase in a large cardboard box lined with heavy plastic, and the grapes were in good condition when we got them home with little crushed at the bottom. RiverRock picked the Clone-6 Cab into our small Microbin.  Both grapes came to use very very clean with very few leaves.  The Sangio berries were very large berry tight clusters and the Clone-6 was small sparse berries.  Both were very tasty! :-D

 

We crushed Sunday night using the electric crusher rented from Brewcon for $50.  The electric crusher worked great and chewed through the 1,200lbs of grapes in no time at all.  We defiantly want to use it for the TON of Roger's cabernet if possible.  The Sangiovase and Cabernet are both in Microbins for fermentation. We scooped the Wood River malbec out of 1 microbin and put it into 2 large plastic bins with fermentation liners so it would be easier to crush into the microbin.  We had lots of help from friends and neighbors that came by for the crush and cleaning out the extra stems that made their way into the must.  The stem-free must will make for nice clean flavors in the wine without any green stem taste.

 

The clone-6 cabernet was good and ripe and seeds were evenly brown.  Brix were a bit higher than expected, because our row is next to an access road in the middle of the vineyard and so it gets more sun. Brix were a solid 27 and PH was a bit high at 3.7.  (A spot check by Dennis at the vinyard a row or more over showed 25.5 brix.)  The Sagiovase was not quite ripe. Seeds were just starting to turn brown and the grape pulp was still tight around them. Although there weren't any "Green" flavors in the Sangiovase grape taste.  Brix was low at 21.5 with a high acids and a PH of 3.3.  We will have to decide if we want to do any modification to the Sangio to balance acids or sugars.  Since it is going to be blended with Cabernet, we might be fine as it will balance out the wine. We'll have to see what the numbers are on Roger's cab that we are going to blend with. It might work out by itself without any additions.

 

Must was sanitized with about 2.5TBSP meta for the cab and 3.33TBSP meta for the Sangiovase. Lee pulled out juice from each to do yeast starters before they were sanitized with the meta and will do a starter in 48 hours.  We are going to use the Lalvin RC 212 Bourgovin yeast on the Malbec and the Sangiovase because the Pastur Red yeast we normally use wasn't available.  We do have some Pastur Red and will use 5 packages for the Clone-6 cabernet as Pastur Red handles higher alcohol levels than Lavin RC212 (which peters out around 14% alcohol and 27 Brix will get closer to 15%).