2009 Cab moved off wood

3/6/11: We moved the 2009 reserve cab off wood into stainless and glass. We will blend it with a little 2009 malbec and/or merlot in April.  We added 15ppm of meta to offset oxidation from racking.  Lee's 30G French barrel is rinsed and drying.  It needs to be sulfured after drying for a week.

 

We combined a smaller barrel and SS Keg of WA Syrah and put it into Ray's newest American oak barrel and then moved the ID Merlot from SS and glass into the small wood barrel.  We made a point of transferring some sediment/lees for MLF food.  We need to order ML cultures and get that started.  We could use a couple more of the larger "red top" breathable bungs.

 

We topped and checked all wines. All the wines are sound with no sign of HSO2. 

Travel Shock Experiment

There have been numerous discussions in the wine-world about "Travel Shock" impacting the flavor of a wine when it is shipped to you.  Many people recommend waiting several weeks after receiving a wine to allow it to recover.  Individuals in our group have had similar experiences where wine that they drove to a friend's house (many miles) didn't "taste right" to them, so we decided to run a test to see if we could detect travel shock in a bottle of wine. 

 

We took 2 identical bottles of 2009 Encore wine and exposed one to travel shock and left the other one alone. Prior to the experiment, both bottles had been stored exactly the same. The "Travel Shock" bottle then rode to Lewiston (300 miles) on a paved curvy road. It sat outside for a day in near freezing temperatures (while it's owner fished!), and then was driven a couple more hours and taken inside a warm house where it sat for 2 days.  It then drove 270 miles home and was sat upright next to the control-bottle for 66 hours inside a house. Both bottles were opened for an hour and then blind poured to be compared. 

 

Both wines drank just fine and people generally felt they were the same wine. There were some minor differences noted by some for flavor or smell, but nothing consistent or very significant. 

 

Possible Conclusions:

 

1. Travel shock is not real.

2. 66 hours was enough time to recover from travel shock.

3. The type of wine was not susceptible to travel shock, such as no sediment, not aged, not tannic.

 

Based on this limited result we think drinking wine that has been shipped is "safe" after 3 days.  We may look for other opportunities to try similar experiments in the future.

 

Fwd: Bottles and blending

Forwarding white blending/bottling info from Mike.  I will add $100 paid by Lee to this year's expenses for the Riesling.

 

Troy

 

-----

A gorgeous day!  In about 2 hours, we washed up about 18 cases of non-shouldered bottles in prep for bottling the whites tomorrow starting around noon.  Washing didn't take long due to good precleaning.  Thanks to all of us for doing a better job. 

 

We tried the Reisling and Viogner.  The Reisling has a slight nose of peach, soft finish.  It is Ok by itself.  The Viogner is a cool site Viogner and has little nose; a bit of a tart start with a nice grapefruit finish.  It will go nicely with food.   After tasting 75/25% (both ways) and 50/50% blends, we decided all three blends have merit.  We decided to blend 10 gals each of Reisling/Viogner for 20 gallons of 50/50 blend; 5 gal of Reisling by itself (this one carboy is a bit fizzy)  and 15 gallons of Viogner by itself.   We dumped the container of Reisling marked NO.  It had a bad nose and very poor taste.  We should end up with about 3+ cases of white wine each.  We do need to discuss settling up on the Reisling.  We think Lee purchased it along, since none of the rest of us remember ponying up any $$ to contribute. 

 

We will move the Cabernet into SS and glass within the next few days also.  We will then move the WA Syrah from one 18 gal wood barrel and one 15.5 gal SS keg into a 30 gal wood barrel.  We will also move the Idaho Merlot from the 15.5 gal SS keg + the 4 gal in carboys into the vacated 18 gal barrel now containing WA Syrah leaving a little extra for topping.   We will talk more on the moving and consolidation of wines tomorrow during bottling of the whites.   

 

Winery Update

2/24/2011: Cabernet Tasting Trials. We tried 100% samples, 60/40, 50/50 and 40/60. Some people liked the 60/40 and some liked the 40/60. We all agreed that the wine was to cold to get a good feel for it.  We tried adding 5% malbec into a blend and most people liked that better.
 
We're going to move the ID Cabs into Stainless Steel Kegs and glass carboys to get it off of the oak and wait to bottle until the Malbec has gone through MLF (sometime in May) and then do another trial blending.  The 2010 cabs were topped up some, but not all the way. The extra 1G of 2010 wine in a carboy had a funky smell and taste.  We'll need to address moving the wine around soon.
 
We are preparing to bottle our Viognier. We may blend it with the left-over McAurthur Riesling. Meta levels are low, so we should add a little meta (15ppm), which will mostly blow off as we bottle. We decided to not filter this year because of prior issues. But we'll need to keep an eye on the wines to see if they pop corks from MLF.
 
2/17/2011: Topped and Tasted. All wines coming along well. ID Syrah and Malbec are over their HSO2 smell.  We tried a bottle of our 2006 cabernet. We had a glass poured undisturbed and then shook the bottle (similar to the repetitive inverting that happened during the recent comparative tasting) and poured a second glass. The biggest different was the clarity. The second glass was very cloudy.  There was some difference in the nose from disturbing the sediment, but it wasn't as evident as what we remembered from the comparative tasting. Ray suggested that the difference may be attributed to bottle variation or storage variation.  In either case we agreed that it would be worth opening bottles to check them before submitting them to a contest in the future.

2-8-2011 Viognier Lab Report

We ran tests at WineWise on the Viognier in preperation for bottling.  SO2 is at 8ppm and Malic acid is 1.70 g/L.

 

White wines require a higher level of SO2 than red wines and our low SO2 levels are likely contributing to our loosing the "freshness" and flavor in our white wines come Spring.  We need to discuss increasing our SO2 levels for whites when we rack them off the gross lees. Our Sulfites notes page gives a target of 35ppm for white wines.

 

The lab report shows a significant level of Malic acid in the Viognier. We didn't measure Malic acid on the must so we don't know if the amount of Malic acid has changed since primary fermentation.

 

The Viognier was fermented in a wood barrel and sat in that barrel for 4 weeks after fermentation was complete. So if it was exposed to ML cultures from the barrel I think it would have gone through MLF at that point as temperatures were warm enough. The only thing that would have inhibited it from going through ML would have been high SO2 levels.  But given our current level of 8ppm SO2 I would estimate that the SO2 was around 20ppm when we racked it out of the barrel--not too high for MLF to occur.

We should taste the Viognier to determine if we want it to go through MLF. If it has a very tart-apple taste then going through MLF will soften the wine. Going through MLF will also reduce the overall fruitiness.

 

If we decide we like the taste of the wine we can proceed with bottling it, with the addition of SO2 prior to racking it out of containers to protect it (we'll loose approx 10ppm from bottling).  The risk of bottling before MLF is that it could happen in the bottles which will result in corks-a-poppin. 

 

Troy

Rotten Egg Smell Mostly Gone

Last weekend we checked the Malbec and Syrah and they smelled much better. Just a small amount of rotten eggs in the Malbec. We racked them both off any sediment that had dropped and added 15ppm of meta (but not over copper).  We are very happy with the progress and think we've exorcised the rotten spirits.  We topped the rest of the wines. All smelled fine.

We tasted the 2009 cabernets. Both taste great and are at a good oak balance.  We will do some tasting trials and bottle in late February.  We don't have any Malbec or Petit Verdot this year so we'll be just blending the 2 cabs.

 

We have 60+ gallons, which will be 25+ cases (5 cases each...YEA!).  Everyone start getting your bottles ready.  We need 5 cases of shouldered bottles for the cab, plus we'll need some to bottle the Riesling.  We have to decide if we can bottle the Viognier now.  It hasn't had a chance to go through MLF and could blow corks if we bottle it now without filtering.  I think we're all hesitant about filtering because of the problems we've had.

 

 Previous Blog Entry from Sat, Jan 8, 2011

Ray and Mike racked the Idaho Merlot on Sat. 1/8.  We ended up with 20 gallons (15.5 keg; 3 gal carb; 1 gal carb; 1 plat) out of approximately 22 + gallons of pressings.  The wine smelled good, tasted good (slightly tart).  We added a touch of meta per the book.   The other barrels we checked smelled OK and were only down slightly.  Mike 

 

Racking

We racked the ID Syrah off the Gross Lees today. It has some rotten egg smell so we added 20ppm meta and racked it back into the barrel over copper

 

We racked the ID Cab off the Gross Lees. It smells great.

 

The Malbec is better, but still smells. We added 20ppm meta and racked it out/in over copper.

 

We found that the 15G Hungarian barrel had WA Cab in it....still on the gross lees. Ooops.  We racked it and added 20ppm meta. No problems detected.

 

We still need to rack the Merlot off the Gross lees, sometime in the next 2 weeks.  The Syrah and Malbec need to be checked in a couple weeks and racked again.

 

All barrels were topped.

 

Possibly Low SO2 in WA Cab

Bill's group that got Dennis' Sangio grapes and Larry's red-grape blend did some testing at WineWise. I thought the results were worth passing along.

 

The pH was about what we expected, but the SO2 levels were much lower than expected.  I expected about 15ppm and they had 4ppm.  What I think happened is that their 60G barrel was down 5 gallons while they waited for Larry's wine to ferment. During that time they had more air exposure, which drained down the SO2 level.

 

One reason I bring this up, is because we experienced the same thing in our WA Cabernet. We found the barrel down considerably when we went to rack it off the gross lees (it sat for over a month this way).  I expect that this means we also burned extra SO2 and are down close to zero.  I recommend we add some meta to the WA Cabernet.  If we want, we can have WineWise measure the SO2 levels (for  $ 13), or we can just add 10-15ppm to the wine (remembering that only 1/2 of that makes it into Free SO2).

 

Troy

 

 

Sample # 1		Result:		Date:		Method:
2010 Sangiovese
pH		3.14		12/15/2010		ph probe
Free SO2	<5		mg/L (ppm)		12/15/2010		Auto Titrator
4.03				mg/L (ppm)
Sample #2
2010 Grenache
pH		3.46		12/15/2010		ph probe

Last Pressing

The ID Malbec finally dropped below 0 brix and we pressed it Merlot today.  We pressed moderately hard and got about 21 gallons. It's resting in a SS Keg and carboys until we have an open barrel from bottling the Cab reserve.  The Merlot had been on the skins for about a month and picked up quite a bit of skins/seeds tannins.  It took a long time to ferment because of the cool temperatures.

 

We racked the ID Malbec off the gross lees.  It had a very bad rotten egg smell (HSO2) so we added 20ppm sulfites and racked it over copper flashing in and out of the barrel.  That helped the smell some, but we'll need to rack it again in 2 - 3 weeks to get it off of the precipitants.

 

We also racked the WA Cab off the gross lees. It had been sitting for quite awhile finishing fermentation, as we pressed it with some sugar left.  We were surprised to see the barrel down a good 3 inches. We didn't realize it was that far down.  The taste in the barrel was OK, but not as much fruit as a carboy.

 

We still have the ID Syrah, Cab and Merlot to rack off the gross lees, and we need to rack the Malbec again.

 

Idaho Cab Pressed

We pressed the Williamson Cabernet today.  Flavors and color are great. We are very pleased with how it turned out.

We pressed pretty hard and got almost 19 gallons from 27G of must (about a 70% yield).  It was a small batch and went very quickly.

Wine is in Lee's recooped Demtos barrel plus a 3G carboy and platypus.  

Pictures are updated in Picasa  http://picasaweb.google.com/riverwoodswinery/Wine2010 

ID Cab Ready To Press

The Williamson Cabernet has dropped below 0 brix (0.998 specific gravity), after fermenting for 25 days (31 days on the skins, including the cold soak).  Flavor and color are excellent and it's time to press it.  It's a small batch (26G of must) so it will go quickly.  The cab will go into Lee's re-cooped Demtos barrel plus a few carboys.

The ID Merlot is still fermenting slowly. It is at 4.5 brix and 65 degrees. It will take another week to finish fermenting. It was crushed on Nov 13th, so it has been on the skins for 3 weeks so far.  We are tentatively set for the following Sunday, Dec 12th, to press the merlot.  The merlot will go into a SS keg until we bottle the 2009 reserve cab.

Because of the late harvest and cold temperatures this year we have had to put warm water bottles in the must and wrap the fermentation containers with blankets and run a garage heater to keep them warm enough to ferment.  We are avoiding pressing before they are done fermenting to ensure that they don't get stuck with some residual sugar.  The WA Cab (which was pressed early because of green seeds) has taken a month to drop the last few brix. It is at zero, but still bubbling slightly.  

The platypus containers with Malbec and WA Cab had quite a bit of gas build-up in them, showing they are still fermenting some.  We vented the excess gas and you can really smell the HSO2 on the Malbec. We need to rack it off the gross lees in another week and should consider running it over the copper flashing.  The ID Syrah and WA Cab also need to be racked off the gross lees.

Malbec and Tempranillo Pressed 11/27

We pressed the Tempranillo and Malbec on 11/27. We got 36 gallons of Malbec from 56G of must (64% yield) and  65.5G of Tempranillo (63% yield).    The Malbec is in a 30G Hungarian barrel.  Here is the count of gallons of Tempranillo that everyone took.  We got less Tempranillo than we expected so Riverwoods ended up not keeping any, although Michele said she might be interested in doing a Tempranillo/Syrah blend with us.

 

Tempranillo Gallons

Michele and Tom: (15G + 3G) 18G

Jim: (15 + 2.5) 17.5G

Kirkland: 15G

Casey: 15G

 

The cab and merlot are still fermenting slowly. Today (11/28) the Cab was at 3 brix (down 2 brix in 2 days) and the Merlot was at 10 brix (also down 2 brix).  We are continuing to put warm water jugs in them to keep the temps up. We might consider trying wrapping them in a blanket or something to help them retain heat better.  They will be ready to press by the end of this week. It could be done Thursday, before the Williamsons come over, or on Saturday afterwards.

 

Troy

Malbec and Tempranillo Ready To Press

The cap is falling on the Malbec and the Tempranillo is at 0 brix, but still active.  They are both ready to press.

 

The Merlot is fermenting slowly at 12 brix, and so is the cab which is at 5 brix. They haven't dropped muchin the last 4 days because their temperatures have dropped to 58-60 degrees, below their desired range for good fermentation, due to the near record cold temperatures outside. We've been trying to warm them with hot water jugs and running a heater in the garage to get them going better, but they likely won't be ready to press for another week.

Winery Update

Punchdown tonight. The malbec has fermented fast and is at 1 brix, with a slight HSO2 smell. The Tempranillo is at 5.5, the Id cab 7.5, the Merlot is 15.5. We will try and press saturday at noon.

We got a ph report back and phs are down in the 3.57-3.63 range, which is great.  No further acid additions needed.

Fermentation Update

We punched down and checked the grapes around noon today.  We put a 2G jug of warm water into the ID cab to get its temp up.  Everything is fermenting well. We'll re-check the pH on Monday and do a second adjustment where needed.

 

• ID Cab is at 8.5 brix, 62 degrees
• Merlot is at 21.5 brix, 66 degrees
• Malbec is at 12 brix, 72 degrees
• Tempranillo is at 16.5 brix, 66 degrees
• The WA Cab still appears to be fermenting slightly in the carboys. We should check it's brix.

 

Upcoming Activities:

• Transfer Merlot from Mike's 30G Hungarian into Ray's new 30G American Barrel
• Press the ID Cab and Malbec after Thanksgiving. The ID Cab goes into Lee's 15G Demptos. Malbec goes into Mike's hungarian 30G.
• Press the Tempranillo and Merlot no later than Dec 1st, to give us time to cleanup the winery.
• Rack the ID Syrah and WA Cab off the Gross Lees around Dec 1.
• We would like to get the winery cleaned up and everything put away in time for the Williamson's visit, Friday Dec 3rd.
• Rack the Tempranillo/Malbec/Merlot/IDCab off the Gross Lees the second week of December.

Acid Adjstments on Kornze Grapes

We adjusted the acids today on the Tempranillo, Merlot and Malbec we got from Larry to get the pH down to 3.7 or so. We added 1/2 of the adjustment now and we'll re-test the pH before adding more.  Our pH meter isn't working so we'll get the must re-tested at WineWiseIdaho (re-tests are no charge).

 

We used the acid addition calculator on vinoenolgy.com (http://vinoenology.com/calculators/acid-addition/) with 1 slight adjustment. Instead of using gallons of must we used gallons of wine--which is how we've done the calculations in the past.

 

All of the grapes are fermenting well and tonight we added nutrient at the punch-down.  The additions are listed below.

 
 
Tempranillo, 104 G Must, est 73G wine
- Sarting pH is 3.92,  Target is 3.72.
- Acid addition total of 2 g/l,  553 grams, 37 TBSP (add 1/2 at a time)
 
Malbec, 56G Must, est 39G wine
Starting pH is 3.85, Target us 3.75
- Acid addition total of 1 g/l, 148 grams, 10 TBSP (add 1/2 at a time)
 
Merlot, 27G Must, est 19 G wine
Starting pH is 3.99, Target is 3.74
- Acid addition total of 2.5 g/l, 180 grams, 12 TBSP (add 1/2 at a time)
 

Williamson Syrah Pressed

We pressed the Williamson Syrah on Tuesday 11/16.  It was at 0 brix and the cap was starting to fall.  Flavor and color were great!! We're very happy with it. We got 53 G of pressed wine out of 73G must (plus 7G water). We pressed pretty hard--flavors were good. Unfortunatly we lost some wine including 5G carboy that was dropped and some wine that was spilled. Jim took home 6G in carboys and we set aside a 5G carboy for Casey (Ray's friend).

We racked the WA Syrah off the gross lees and into wood. The flavor continues to be a bit tart. Talking with Angie about it, she think's it is the higher amount of malic acid that wine has (3.41 g/l). It will soften after MLF.  It will be interesting to see the wine change over time.

We also racked the Viognier off the gross lees. It's been sitting in the 60G barrel after finishing fermenting, for about a month. It is tasting pretty good, you can taste the oak and it has some nice varietal flavors.  It's a bit tart. Might be worth going through MLF? We have 27G of VIognier in SS and carboys.  The 60G barrel has been rinsed well and had a meta/citric rinse. After a week of drying upside-down we need to burn a sulfur wick in it.

We innoculated Larry's grapes (tempranillo, merlot and malbec) after a 4-5 day cold soak.  Punch-down last night showed them starting activity but no cap yet.  All of them have a high PH so we will have to do some acid adjustments. Troy and Ray will start that today (Friday).

Roger's cab is still fermenting well. It was down to 14.5 brix on Tuesday.

A note on the carboys. When Lee and I were punching down on Wednesday we ran into a of 5G carboy that had some extra racked WA Syrah but NO bung!. I looked around and didn't see one that had popped out.  One of the 1G stoppers was loose and 1 of the stainless keg bungs had popped open. I marked those containers with a piece of blue tape. Let's keep an eye on them, and the rest of the bungs as well.

 

There is some new wood in the garage to check out. Lee had his Demtos barrel re-cooped and Ray bought a new 30G American barrel for the WA Merlot.

Fwd: Larry's grape info

Forwarding this email from Mike to the Riverwoods Blog

---------- Forwarded message ----------
From: Margaret Dimmick

Date: Sat, Nov 13, 2010 at 1:29 PM
Subject: Larry's grape info

On 11/12 Bob, Ray, Mike went to Larry's and picked grapes for both ourselves and Bill Thompson's group. Grapes were .75/lb and Larry charged us $75 for crushing. Mike paid Larry for both the grapes and crushing. 1,930 X .75 = $1,447.50 + $75 = ($1,522.50)

BILLS: 150# Granache/40# Sangio/20# Barbera= 210#must sanitized 25.5 brix (small dark blue barrel)

Bill owes Mike $157.50 for grapes and $8.50 for crushing = $165.75.

OURS:

420# Malbec 56 gallons must 25.5 brix ? ph sanitized added ice bottles on noon 11/13 (microbin)

300# Merlot est. 27 gallons must 27 brix ?ph sanitized added ice bottles on noon 11/13 (White barrel)

1000# Temp 104 gallons must 26 brix ?ph sanitized added ice bottles noon on 11/13. (macrobin)

ID Cab Inoculated

We inoculated the ID Cab with Pasteur Red yeast after a 5 day cold soak.  We're doing more cold soaking this year and liking the color/flavors we're getting. Our first good cold soak was last year with the Petite Sirah Port, which we cold soaked to extract color/flavor early because knew we would have to stop fermentation early.

 

Because the Brix on the ID Cab were high (29.1) we needed to bring them down. The pH was 3.73, so we used the minimum water to avoid raising the pH too much. Pasteur Red will ferment up to 16% alcohol, so we needed to bring it down from 29.1 to around 27.5.  We add about 1.7G of water total to 25-26G must (from 285# of grapes).

 

The ID Syrah is still fermenting well, but is slowing down.

 

We will get grapes from Larry this week (tempranillo, merlot, malbec). He is going to crush for us (THANKS, LARRY!)

 

Crush, Press, Press

A BIG night in the winery.

 

We were able to get ahold of a little of Roger's cab that was picked today. With the good late weather he was able to get it ripe.  The seeds were good and brown. Fruit was saggy and slightly dehydrated with some raisins.  We got 25-26G Must out of 285# of grapes, which should give us about 17G of pressed wine.  It's been sanitized with a rounded TBSP of meta and is on cold soak for 4-5 days.  The Brix came in very high, 31.5 on our Hydrometer with a PH of 3.45. Troy or Mike will run a juice sample down to WineWise on Thursday to verify the pH and Brix numbers before we do any adjustments to lower the Brix.

 

We pressed the WA Cab and got about 44G. It had been on the skins for 10 days (4 days cold soak, 6 days fermenting).  It had great color. Dark and rich. Flavors were good, but still sweet as it's around 14 brix. We pressed it earlier than normal because we wanted to avoid contact with the green seeds as the alcohol levels rose. We pressed lightly to avoid any seed tannins and to keep the pH lower.

 

We pressed the WA Syrah, which was at 0 brix but still fermenting slowly, and got 76G. It has been on the skins for 14 days, including a 4 day cold soak. The taste had recently turned acidic. We're not sure why. We did do a small acid correction before starting fermentation...maybe it's from that. We'll keep an eye on it.