Winter Wine Work

One of the most pleasant winemaking surprises so far has been the 2019 Frontenac. I had low expectations for this wine. Previous harvests have shown Frontenac to be color unstable and the Frontenac rosé from 2018 is bad enough I've got it in the dump pile. I put 4 gallons of 2019 Frontenac red wine in a barrel last February and have more or less kept it topped up. Four months ago I was ready to dump this wine as well - it was not color-stable, it was thin, and I was concerned it might be oxidized. Fast forward to today, and this wine is pretty darn good. Color somehow is improved and taste-wise it has smoothed out very nicely. I needed the barrel for 2020 wines, so I just went ahead and bottled 2 cases today. 

Additionally, I racked another 7 gallons of Vidal after a month of cold stabilization. I continue to keep separate 4 different batches of the enormous harvest. The last 5 gallons of "less ripe" Vidal went into the fridge to cold stabilize today. Chambourcin went into a 15l barrel with just under 5 gallons left. The plan there is 6 months of barrel aging for each half of the batch. The 2020 Frontenac went in the other 15l barrel. The Foch will go into the 10l barrel once it seals up.

The basement has been a disaster for some time, and we finally got around to cleaning it up. This meant assembling a wine rack. It doesn't hold every bottle but holds some of everything we drink. Lisa got some nice dry erase bottle labels.

2020 Wines - Chapter 6 - Chambourcin

It is with some sadness that we're making this batch of wine. We had high hopes for Norton and Chambourcin in the vineyard, but both varietals have been decimated with crown gall and I'm not optimistic that we'll get fruit again next year. We took about 120# of Chambourcin this year and we'll end up with about 9 gallons from it. 

My record-keeping has been terrible with this batch. I wrote everything down but I lost my notes, thus the late post. I do remember the the starting numbers were great. I didn't adjust pH and made minimal adjustment to sugar - or maybe it was the other way around, minimal pH adjustment, no sugar adjustment. Anyway, either way, these grapes came in better than any others I've grown. 71B to work down the malic, and VP41 for the MLB, co-inoculated. I pressed it off into 3 3gallon carboys plus almost another gallon. After a couple of days racked off gross lees and added 7 oak cubes per gallon to finish up. Great color on this wine, hopes are high. 

2020 Wines - Chapter 5 - Vidal

 This year we harvested about 400# of Vidal. We attempted to separate less ripe from more ripe fruit. We ended up with 15.3g from ripe fruit, 4g mixed with Frontenac Gris (giving it a darker color), and 4g of less ripe fruit. We cold settled the wine and one bucket came out dark, I believe that to be due to my failure to get KMS in the bucket. So I segregated that bucket as well, and any thoughts I had of using my 110l Speidel variable capacity tank were tossed aside. In the ripe, gris, less ripe batches, respectively, we got pH 2.88, 2.88, 2.86; pH was adjusted with 2t, 1t, 1.5t of calcium carbonate, respectively, to final pH of 2.97, 2.95, and 2.99. I fermented with QA23 again, along with the usual Booster Blanc and Opti White doses, and bentonite day 3. 

Given the number of buckets and size of batch, we couldn't really drop the temps much and it pretty much ripped through in a week. And again, like last year, got a reductive. I hit it early with a bench-trialed dose of 25ppm. It's cold stabilizing now, one carboy at a time. It will need fining, each carboy is not clearing well. Total is 22 gallons, we'll see if we end up bottling all of it.