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. 

2020 Wines - Chapter 3 - Foch

The 2019 Foch will be drinkable with decent color. We're trying some new techniques described here to preserve the color in 2020. 

Harvest brought in 51#, far less than the ~200# last year. Dancing Man kept some of the critters away, but we still lost 1/3-1/2 of the crop to critter losses. The yield this year was lower as well, probably due to a late frost. I calculated the TA at 17, pH 2.98. Crush and destem yielded over 5g of must. I treated with 50ppm SO2, then used the double salt technique 61g calcium carbonate to get TA to 10, pH 3.8. I added back some tartaric to get the pH to 3.41. 1.076 + 488g sugar to get to 1.090. Opti Red and Booster Rouge but no enzymes. 

I pitched yeast 8/16, VP41 8/17, then pressed 8/22 and immediately added 2.8g Enartis Tan Uva. Wound up with 3.5g plus a bottle for topping. Some oak cubes will help finish MLF. 

Harvest Approaches

 Foch was at 17 Brix last week. I haven't checked this week, but it smells like it is getting close. 

This weekend's list, complete:

• Weed/Roundup the elderberries
• Dig up volunteer ornamental grasses
• Clean mud daubers off porch and garage
• Net the grapes
• Remove the grow tubes
• Weed the berm
• Weed the liriope
• Prune the lychees

We're targeting shorter, more frequent posts for my brother. So finally some nice pictures.

And from last week, Lake Michigan:

2020 Wines - Chapter 2 - Passion Fruit

This is potentially a beautiful wine, one which did not deserve my shabby record-keeping. I was more focused on the jaboticaba wine I had going at the same time, and now I can't find any of my notes. I know that I didn't use any secondary fruit, adjusted the pH up a bit with calcium carbonate, and fermented cool and slow. It looks great - it always starts the color of store-bought orange juice, then lightens up. Thankfully it didn't lose the aroma of passion fruit through the fermentation.

2020 Wines - Chapter 1 - Jaboticaba

I've been saving this fruit for years, literally; freezing every fruit that comes from the two trees. That may explain the short-term outcome. But I'm committed. And I'm committed to a second batch as well, which hopefully will come along more quickly than the first. It went like this:

• Thaw, then crush 3.8kg of fruit. TA 0.83%, pH 3.20, SG 1.030.
• Added 2.2l water, assuming 50% of the fruit volume will contribute to the final volume to just over 1g (some for topping).
• 3ml 10% KMS.
• 465g sugar to ~1.075.
• 1t pectic 
• 0.2g Lallzyme EX
• 1g each Opti Red and Booster Rouge.

No tannin additions. After 24 hours, another 155g sugar to 1.090. The pH was 3.05 and TA 0.97%. RC 212 and step feeding.

I pulled the seeds and skins after 72 hours to eliminate potential for any bitterness. This pic shows where we were mid-fermentation.

The problem is that even with KMS at crush and even before going dry, the wine took this brick color just a couple of days later.

We have about 4 bottles worth. We'll finish this out, but the color instability is a little disappointing. It doesn't taste or smell oxidized. Maybe that's just the color the fruit wants to give. Time will tell, but now it is time to start collecting a new batch of fruit.