Cab & Malbec Racked Off The Gross Lees

The group met and racked the barrels of Merlot and Cabernet off their gross lees today. We spot checked the sugars and the merlot was down to .994 and the cab was at .996. Both down a little since we pressed, but could use to drop a little further.  The cab had considerable sediment on the bottom and we lost 2 gallons or so in each barrel.   Troy's 15G Hungarian was emptied out while racking the cab, and needs a meta rinse.  It will stay empty until the Sangio is ready.

 

We re-racked the sangio over copper again. The sangio continues to smell better. The stainless kegs that have been racked once more than the others had very little to no rotten egg smell!  We are delighted to be rid of the nasty smell and we plan to filter the sangio in the next week or so to (hopefully) keep it from coming back.  Some of the sangio still had considerable gunky-ness settled to the bottom as the precipitants have been coming out from adding extra meta and racking over the copper.  We've been aggressivly discarding any sediment when we rack.

 

We plan to keep the sangio in stainless kegs and glass until we are sure it is "sound", so that it doesn't contaminate a barrel. Once we're confident it is good (a couple weeks after filtering) we'll combine it with some of the cabernet to make the base of the Super Tuscan.  We tried some blending today and about a 60% cabernet and 40% sangio was good. Could use a shot of Petit Verdot too.  I think the first Super Tuscan had approx 10% petit verdot.

 

The group reviewed the Fall expenses and Troy will finish the accounting and get the results out to the group.  This year we crushed 5,800 pounds of grapes, compared to 4,100 pounds last year. Both this year and last year we had 6 crushings and 5 pressings.  We pressed out 376 gallons of wine this year!

 

The group decided to create a new category of capital equipment called "Group Capital" that we split the cost of evenly. New items for the category are microbins and the new bottler. We decided to not go back and try and account for previous items, but just keep track of new items from here forward.