Merlot Crushed

We picked up a bin of merlot at Wood River Cellars from Neil Glancy today that he estimated at 1,000lbs of grapes. The grapes came from his vineyard at King Hill, out near Glenns Ferry.  The merlot grapes were smaller which should give us more intense color and flavor, but not as much juice. It will be very interesting to compare to the merlot we've been making from Wood River Vineyard,

 

Neil crushed for us (for $50), which was very nice.  The crusher did a great job and we had very few stems and leaves to pick out.  We transferred the must to a microbin in the garage and measured it. We estimate there is about 70G of must, which is less than we expected. We estimated volume using the formula (8.75" * 8), which is based on the size of the microbin.  Last year from 900 lbs of merlot from wood river vineyard we got 114G of must.  We figure it must be the smaller berries.  When we press we will get about 52G of wine (assuming a 75% yield).  We sanitized with 8 1/2 tsp of meta mixed into a cup of warm water.  We added an ice block (in a plastic jug) to start a cold soak for 48 hours and covered the microbin with a tarp.

 

The chemistry on the merlot was

 

26 Brix

3.8 PH

 

which was slightly higher than what Neil had reported he had measured.  We'll likely do some acid correction on the must to get the PH down .1-.2 points.

 

The Chardonnay was bubbling away. We measured the temperature at 69 degrees. We added more ice on top of the barrel.