I realize that I've been kind of lax in posting recently. Lots of reasons for the absence, but one big one is that I have been on a bottling frenzy. Followed closely by the capsuling frenzy. And then followed by the labeling frenzy. Seems like my dining room has been cluttered with cases of bottles for
The recent bottling run-down has been:
11 Gallons of 2008 Zinfandel
14 Gallons of 2008 Syrah
15 Gallons of 2009 Chardonnay
Whew! I'm exhausted just typing all of that. One good thing about all this bottling activity is that I finally figured out how to control the speed and ullage levels of my Enolmatic bottling system. Faithful readers will recall that I was complaining about this during my debute bottling with the Enolmatic. Well, turns out that there's this little knob on the side that controls the vacuum level. What I thought was the low setting was actually the high setting. If you keep cranking the knob to the left, you actually lower the vacuum level and bottles fill slower. Man, what a difference that makes! Now my ullage levels are more consistent, less wine gets sucked into the overflow containor, and I can cork the previous bottle and still have time to swig a drink of wine before the new bottle is full. Much better!
Salute,
Noel (yeah I'm giving up the pseudonym)
Wednesday, February 24, 2010
Monday, February 15, 2010
Another day of filtering & bottling
I had President's Day off today, so I decided to filter and bottle the last of the chardonnay that had been sitting on oak since early January. Taste tests indicated that the oak level was just about perfect so it was time for action. The filtering actually went quite easily. I used 0.5 micron filter pads in my Buon vino minijet to remove as much sludge as possible and the wine came out crystal clear. I bottled within a couple of hours and got 25 bottles from 5 gallons of wine. The bottles were sealed with 1.5 inch natural corks.
I think I'm pretty much done with filtering & bottling for awhile and should be all set to send off a load of wine for judging in the 2010 Winemaker Magazine Amateur Wine Competition. At the moment, I'm planning on sending at least 8 bottles, possibly 9 if tomorrow night's taste test works out.
Salute,
a MA Winemaker.
I think I'm pretty much done with filtering & bottling for awhile and should be all set to send off a load of wine for judging in the 2010 Winemaker Magazine Amateur Wine Competition. At the moment, I'm planning on sending at least 8 bottles, possibly 9 if tomorrow night's taste test works out.
Salute,
a MA Winemaker.
Saturday, February 6, 2010
Rhubarb Progress
Very brief post here to catch up on the rhubarb wine progress. After a couple of days in the bucket, I poured into carboy to allow the fermentation to finish under an airlock. I added a strong dose of FermaidK to try to overcome the very strong smell of H2S that this wine is kicking off. Here's the result in living color.
Interestingly, this wine is a strong pink color. Will be interesting to see how long this color persists or if it gets bleached out after fermentation is over.
Stay tuned!
a MA Winemaker
Topping, Tastings, and Tossing
I went down into the winery/cellar this afternoon to top off the zinfandel & syrah barrels and pull some wine from the apple and oaking chardonnay to taste their progress. First off, both batches of the apple wine are tasting great! There isn't a lot of obvious difference between the two at the moment (only change was the yeast strain in the fermentation). The second batch that was fermented with 71B-1122 yeast seems a little rounder & fuller in the mouthfeel, which is what I'm wanting since 71B is known to metabolize some of the malic acid to lactic acid.
The chardonnay is also tasting very nice. I racked it off the bentonite treatment on Jan 10 and added a couple sticks of French oak medium toast spirals for some added complexity from the oak. Not as vanilla, buttery, & soft as I'd like so I'll leave it on the spirals for a couple more weeks.
Now this is where I started to get exasperated. I needed to top off the chardonnay & apple carboys to prevent air oxidation of the wine. However, I discovered that my current stock of chardonnay is extremely low! Only 4 bottles of commercial chard in my entire cellar! So I decided to grab the 2007 Sandhill Crane Vineyards Chard for topping off, only to discover that it smells like massive brett invasion. Disappointing--that went down the drain. I next grabbed a 2005 Firelands Isle St. George Barrel Select chard. To my dismay, that bottle was noticeably brown and smelled like sherry. Also went down the drain. Two for two! I've never experienced this rate of bottle failure before!
I really don't want to break into my other two bottles for topping wine since they're rather expensive. So, I'll head out to the liquor store before dinner tonight and grab a bottle or two of inexpensive oaked chardonnay for topping off.
Who'd a thunk?
a MA Winemaker
p.s. Completely forgot about the reds! The syrah is just like ink with big notes of pepper & bright fruit. The zinfandel is also yummy. Big, opulent dark fruit flavors & high alcohol! Both of these have only been the barrel for about a month so there's a long way to go. Stay tuned for further updates.
The chardonnay is also tasting very nice. I racked it off the bentonite treatment on Jan 10 and added a couple sticks of French oak medium toast spirals for some added complexity from the oak. Not as vanilla, buttery, & soft as I'd like so I'll leave it on the spirals for a couple more weeks.
Now this is where I started to get exasperated. I needed to top off the chardonnay & apple carboys to prevent air oxidation of the wine. However, I discovered that my current stock of chardonnay is extremely low! Only 4 bottles of commercial chard in my entire cellar! So I decided to grab the 2007 Sandhill Crane Vineyards Chard for topping off, only to discover that it smells like massive brett invasion. Disappointing--that went down the drain. I next grabbed a 2005 Firelands Isle St. George Barrel Select chard. To my dismay, that bottle was noticeably brown and smelled like sherry. Also went down the drain. Two for two! I've never experienced this rate of bottle failure before!
I really don't want to break into my other two bottles for topping wine since they're rather expensive. So, I'll head out to the liquor store before dinner tonight and grab a bottle or two of inexpensive oaked chardonnay for topping off.
Who'd a thunk?
a MA Winemaker
p.s. Completely forgot about the reds! The syrah is just like ink with big notes of pepper & bright fruit. The zinfandel is also yummy. Big, opulent dark fruit flavors & high alcohol! Both of these have only been the barrel for about a month so there's a long way to go. Stay tuned for further updates.
Monday, January 11, 2010
Rhubarb!
I've had about 9 lbs of rhubarb sitting in my chest freezer since the spring of 2008, but just haven't had the time to get it into a fermenter. This fall, the chest freezer left the house and my kitchen freezer became stuffed to the gills, so the time had come to free up some space. I made a rhubarb wine previously back in 2006 and wasn't all that happy with the results. I went for a strong rhubarb flavor and used 4.5 lbs/gallon. There was also a slight sugar miscalculation and the wine ended up about 14.5% alcohol--aka, rhubarb flavored rocket fuel!
To gain some new inspiration, I popped open one of my last bottles while I contemplated my goals for this wine...
Ewww, YUCK! Holy oxidation, Batman! Tasted like rhubarb flavored sherry--and that's not a good flavor. Apparently the synthetic cork had slowly allowed O2 into the bottle and turned this stuff absolutely rancid.
Back to the drawing board for a wine destined to be a light summer sipper (dry, of course).
There's been a discussion on the Winepress.US forum for a rhubarb wine with some added pineapple juice for complexity (see this link), so I thought I would give it a shot. One of my concerns about fruit wine is that they are very uni-dimensional, i.e. an apple wine tastes like apple, and a raspberry wine tastes like raspberries. Not a lot of other flavors to add complexity. So I was intrigued by adding some citrus notes to the rhubarb. I also thought about fermenting as a normal white wine after "pressing" the juice from the pulp.
With thought whirling through me head, I rolled up my sleeves, pulled the rhubarb out of the freezer and set to work:
1) Placed the frozen chopped rhubarb in a 5 gallon bucket and let thaw a little overnight.
2) Added 4.5 lbs of sugar, Scottzyme Cinn-Free Enzyme, 1/8 tsp potassium metabisulfite, & 0.4 oz calcium carbonate and mixed well (good thing I've been working out this past year--my arm muscles got some exercise mixing all that together)
3) Let stand in the garage to sugar extract & thaw. The cold garage allowed me to let this sit for 7 days without spoilage.
4) Brought back inside to warm up. There was a LOT of liquid extracted from the rhubarb! I "pressed" the pulp by straining through a mesh strainer to obtain about 0.75 gallons of rhubarby goodness.
5) I added 92 oz Dole pineapple juice & 2 gallons distilled water.
6) The must was adjusted to Brix = 19.0 (10.5% potential alcohol) and pH = 3.22 by addition of sugar and tartaric acid. Interestingly the acid addition made the must turn a lovely rosy-salmon color.
7) Hydrated a packet of Lalvin D-47 yeast with Go-Ferm nutrients and added to the must.
I observed a strong fermentation with 18 hrs. It's sitting in the coldest corner of my kitchen at the moment fermenting away. Gone through 1/3 sugar depletion within 48 hours! Lot of foam, but that rosy salmon color is still gorgeous (I'm betting it won't last past the first K-meta addition, but we'll see).
I'll probably pour into a fermenter in a couple of days to ferment under an airlock, but it's certainly going like gang busters!
Cheers,
a MA Winemaker
To gain some new inspiration, I popped open one of my last bottles while I contemplated my goals for this wine...
Ewww, YUCK! Holy oxidation, Batman! Tasted like rhubarb flavored sherry--and that's not a good flavor. Apparently the synthetic cork had slowly allowed O2 into the bottle and turned this stuff absolutely rancid.
Back to the drawing board for a wine destined to be a light summer sipper (dry, of course).
There's been a discussion on the Winepress.US forum for a rhubarb wine with some added pineapple juice for complexity (see this link), so I thought I would give it a shot. One of my concerns about fruit wine is that they are very uni-dimensional, i.e. an apple wine tastes like apple, and a raspberry wine tastes like raspberries. Not a lot of other flavors to add complexity. So I was intrigued by adding some citrus notes to the rhubarb. I also thought about fermenting as a normal white wine after "pressing" the juice from the pulp.
With thought whirling through me head, I rolled up my sleeves, pulled the rhubarb out of the freezer and set to work:
1) Placed the frozen chopped rhubarb in a 5 gallon bucket and let thaw a little overnight.
2) Added 4.5 lbs of sugar, Scottzyme Cinn-Free Enzyme, 1/8 tsp potassium metabisulfite, & 0.4 oz calcium carbonate and mixed well (good thing I've been working out this past year--my arm muscles got some exercise mixing all that together)
3) Let stand in the garage to sugar extract & thaw. The cold garage allowed me to let this sit for 7 days without spoilage.
4) Brought back inside to warm up. There was a LOT of liquid extracted from the rhubarb! I "pressed" the pulp by straining through a mesh strainer to obtain about 0.75 gallons of rhubarby goodness.
5) I added 92 oz Dole pineapple juice & 2 gallons distilled water.
6) The must was adjusted to Brix = 19.0 (10.5% potential alcohol) and pH = 3.22 by addition of sugar and tartaric acid. Interestingly the acid addition made the must turn a lovely rosy-salmon color.
7) Hydrated a packet of Lalvin D-47 yeast with Go-Ferm nutrients and added to the must.
I observed a strong fermentation with 18 hrs. It's sitting in the coldest corner of my kitchen at the moment fermenting away. Gone through 1/3 sugar depletion within 48 hours! Lot of foam, but that rosy salmon color is still gorgeous (I'm betting it won't last past the first K-meta addition, but we'll see).
I'll probably pour into a fermenter in a couple of days to ferment under an airlock, but it's certainly going like gang busters!
Cheers,
a MA Winemaker
Thursday, December 24, 2009
14 Gallons of Syrah and a new toy
I've been meaning to write about my new winemaking toy for a few weeks, but have been struggling to find the time. It's the day before Christmas, my suitcase is packed, and I finally have some free time before I head over to a friend's house for Christmas Eve so here goes (hold your horses)...
I've mentioned the 2008 Chilian Syrah in the past (see post1, post2, & post3). It's been sitting in a Hungarian oak barrel for the past 9 months or so and is now ready for bottling. Now, I'll admit to dreading bottling this wine because it's a 14 gallon barrel. Bottling would mean
pumping the wine out of the barrel into carboys so that I could bottle using the gravity siphon that I've been using for the past 3 years. That's a lot of stuff that needs cleaning when I'm done--groan......
What to do, what to do... Fortunately, modern technology has provided an answer in the Enolmatic! This a vacuum powered bottling device that gently sucks the wine into the bottle and then automatically stops when the bottle is full. Up to this point, I haven't been working on the scale that justified purchasing one of these units. But now that I'm facing a 14 gallon barrel, I took the plunge and bought one as an early birthday present to me.
After it arrived a couple of weeks ago, I sanitized 8 cases of bottles and got to work. In a little more than 30 minutes, I had 7.5 cases bottled, corked, and boxed. And all I had to clean up was the Enolmatic (I'm leaving out the 3 carboys of 2009 Syrah that I put into the now empty barrel, but that would have happened anyway). The Enolmatic truly rocks!
A picture is worth a thousand words, so hopefully these will fill the bill. It's a single bottle unit, but that allows me to turn around and cork a filled bottle while the next bottle is being filled. The close-up of the Enolmatic doesn't do it justice, but there is a vacuum trap chamber on back of the machine that captures excess wine once the bottle is filled. This chamber needs emptying back into the barrel now and then, which provides a little break time every so often. The one complaint I have is that setting the proper fill level is tricky. I had some challenge setting the level too low and having too much ullage or taking the bottle off the machine too slowly and over-filling. Spent a good deal of time pouring a little out of the bottle into a too-low ullage bottle. Still, even with that issue (which I should be able to fix with practice), I finished bottling, corking, and boxing 7.5 cases of wine in just 1-2 hours. And had very little clean up afterwards.
Get yourself an Enolmatic and you'll not regret it!
Salute,
a MA winemaker
I've mentioned the 2008 Chilian Syrah in the past (see post1, post2, & post3). It's been sitting in a Hungarian oak barrel for the past 9 months or so and is now ready for bottling. Now, I'll admit to dreading bottling this wine because it's a 14 gallon barrel. Bottling would mean
pumping the wine out of the barrel into carboys so that I could bottle using the gravity siphon that I've been using for the past 3 years. That's a lot of stuff that needs cleaning when I'm done--groan......What to do, what to do... Fortunately, modern technology has provided an answer in the Enolmatic! This a vacuum powered bottling device that gently sucks the wine into the bottle and then automatically stops when the bottle is full. Up to this point, I haven't been working on the scale that justified purchasing one of these units. But now that I'm facing a 14 gallon barrel, I took the plunge and bought one as an early birthday present to me.
After it arrived a couple of weeks ago, I sanitized 8 cases of bottles and got to work. In a little more than 30 minutes, I had 7.5 cases bottled, corked, and boxed. And all I had to clean up was the Enolmatic (I'm leaving out the 3 carboys of 2009 Syrah that I put into the now empty barrel, but that would have happened anyway). The Enolmatic truly rocks!
A picture is worth a thousand words, so hopefully these will fill the bill. It's a single bottle unit, but that allows me to turn around and cork a filled bottle while the next bottle is being filled. The close-up of the Enolmatic doesn't do it justice, but there is a vacuum trap chamber on back of the machine that captures excess wine once the bottle is filled. This chamber needs emptying back into the barrel now and then, which provides a little break time every so often. The one complaint I have is that setting the proper fill level is tricky. I had some challenge setting the level too low and having too much ullage or taking the bottle off the machine too slowly and over-filling. Spent a good deal of time pouring a little out of the bottle into a too-low ullage bottle. Still, even with that issue (which I should be able to fix with practice), I finished bottling, corking, and boxing 7.5 cases of wine in just 1-2 hours. And had very little clean up afterwards.
Get yourself an Enolmatic and you'll not regret it!
Salute,
a MA winemaker
Wednesday, December 23, 2009
Protein--be stabilized!
Last year, I had a stability issue with my 2008 Northern CA sauvignon blanc. It was crystal clear when I bottled (I swear--even filtered with a 0.5 micron filter), but as the summer progressed and temps in the basement cellar rose, some slight sediment fell out. Didn't affect the amazing taste or aroma, but the slight haze resulted in poor marks in the Winepress.US competition. The judges uniformly stated that without the haze, it would have been the Best of White by a long shot. Oh well, that's my bad. BUT--how to prevent this from happening again in the future???
The most likely conclusion that I've come to is a protein haze. My research tells me that Sauvignon blanc is notorious for protein hazes that form upon warming. These proteins are soluble at lower temperatures, but start to denature and precipitate as the temperature increases. A common preventative is to fine the wine with bentonite. The bentonite clay absorbs the soluble proteins and fall to the bottom of the carboy.
The main reason I've been looking into this is because I've got 15 gallons of 2009 Chilian chardonnay that I'd like to bottle soon. I had split the chard into 3 different 5 gallon batches to experiment with different yeasts, MLF, and oakings. Two carboys are crystal clear while the third is still a little hazy. I decided to do a light dose bentonite fining on the clear carboys for protein stabilization and a heavy dose on the hazy carboy for clearing & protein stabilization. Gets a little more complicated when one of the clear carboys has some lees at the bottom, so I have only had time to bentonite fine the other clear carboy. The other two will have to wait until after Christmas when I can rack them off the lees deposits.
That all said and done, I hydrated a 1.5 g/gallon dose of bentonite in 3/4 c of warm water--swirling like crazy and then letting the mixture sit for 24 hr. Only then did I pull some wine out and dump in the bentonite suspension and top off the carboy. After giving a good swirl to mix, the suspension has been slowly falling out over the past couple of days. I may have to bring the carboy upstairs to warm to room temperature before racking and bottling, but will see after Christmas.
By the way--the left over wine that I had to taste was AMAZING! Clean & crisp, with bright green apple & citrus flavors. Ooh, boy! Can't wait for this one!
Salute,
a MA Winemaker
The most likely conclusion that I've come to is a protein haze. My research tells me that Sauvignon blanc is notorious for protein hazes that form upon warming. These proteins are soluble at lower temperatures, but start to denature and precipitate as the temperature increases. A common preventative is to fine the wine with bentonite. The bentonite clay absorbs the soluble proteins and fall to the bottom of the carboy.
The main reason I've been looking into this is because I've got 15 gallons of 2009 Chilian chardonnay that I'd like to bottle soon. I had split the chard into 3 different 5 gallon batches to experiment with different yeasts, MLF, and oakings. Two carboys are crystal clear while the third is still a little hazy. I decided to do a light dose bentonite fining on the clear carboys for protein stabilization and a heavy dose on the hazy carboy for clearing & protein stabilization. Gets a little more complicated when one of the clear carboys has some lees at the bottom, so I have only had time to bentonite fine the other clear carboy. The other two will have to wait until after Christmas when I can rack them off the lees deposits.
That all said and done, I hydrated a 1.5 g/gallon dose of bentonite in 3/4 c of warm water--swirling like crazy and then letting the mixture sit for 24 hr. Only then did I pull some wine out and dump in the bentonite suspension and top off the carboy. After giving a good swirl to mix, the suspension has been slowly falling out over the past couple of days. I may have to bring the carboy upstairs to warm to room temperature before racking and bottling, but will see after Christmas.
By the way--the left over wine that I had to taste was AMAZING! Clean & crisp, with bright green apple & citrus flavors. Ooh, boy! Can't wait for this one!
Salute,
a MA Winemaker
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