Sauvignon Blanc

September 10th, 2023
I had a convenient opportunity to do a side project of white wine this year. The Cal Wine Broker sent an email offering Sauvignon Blanc (a white I was interested in) on a weekend I wasn’t particularly busy on. Sign me up!

After meeting at 6:30am at a Brentwood gas station we went to Serendipity Cellars and I got to pick my own grapes almost exactly here. I picked for 1.5 hours filling some totes I brought. The clusters were really tight onto the vine and finding where to snip was difficult. Some of the clusters had vine rot which I skipped over. But all in all it looked pretty good. I didn’t really have a good sense of weight, but I left after about 1.5 hours and had 178 lbs and paid 80 cents for a total of $132. (A little less since I think he tared some of the weight away for the totes).

I took it home and through it through the crusher/destemmer. It was very easy! I made a DIY press drilling a ton of 1/8″ holes in an old bucket and using my cap puncher and my body weight to squeeze it out. I think I had to get most of it out, I was pleased with how much I extracted. I put them in buckets, but then later in carboys and it was two full carboys at the end of it. I added 50ppm SO2 immediately after the press, and pitched DYW56 ICV-D47 Dry Wine Yeast (8 g) of yeast at the 24 hour mark. The airlock went crazy for a few days! On September 18th, I added bentonite, 4tsp in 1c of hot water for each carboy. I might be too late for this as they say to do it during active fermentation as it’s really volatile. Doing it now the bentonite might just go to the bottom and be less effective, we’ll see. I should rack this to clean carboys in a week or so, then they just age.

September 24th, 2023

Ok, now for the main event. I went back to the same Lodi Zinfandel from last year. I was busy this year and didn’t have a ton of time to search around, and his price is great. I was told before the pick that the grapes might not be super ready, but I was ok with that since this was the only day my dad and brother could do it. I kinda didn’t have any other choice. I got there at 10am and he had picked 1000# already and went back out to pick 250# while we loaded. He never weighed anything, but I think it was in the ballpark. He asked for $800 which was lower than what we agreed on, so I paid him $850, he was super generous. We loaded the 3 big fermentors and ~4 smaller totes full of grapes and had plenty of bed space in Colin’s big truck. It took us 30 min to load. We went home and crushed/destemmed it all in about 40 minutes. We are really getting good at this! We were done (before cleaning) at 1pm. The cleaning was another story, I hosed everything down pretty good. But I really have to wipe all surfaces by hand. The sirup-y feel just doesn’t go away otherwise. I used my new “press” from above as a strainer and strained away 6 gal for rose, and then I have the three big fermentors full of must plus one bucket.

The brix was a little concerning. The three tubs are 22, 20 and 21. That is low! I put 50ppm SO2 on all of it. And I pitched yeast at the 24 hour mark and began to punch the cap twice a day.

I decided to add 10lbs of white sugar desolved in water split roughly equally between the 3 tubs (with the lowest, tub #2 getting a little more). Volume-wise this was about 8 cups of sugar to equal 3.33lbs which went in each tub. My math told me this would add about 1 brix to each tub. Well look at the results below. A few observations. It seems the brix went up after day 0 before adding the sugar! And my measurement four hours after the sugar was added showed the brix going down/up/down in the three tubs. Upon looking at the reading on Day 4, it seems to be in very active fermentation such that it’s very possible that I added ~1 brix of sugar and then the yeast ate 1 brix of sugar in a 5 hour period. Since the brix was meaningfully moving over time, it isn’t really possible to measure how much brix of sugar I added. I’m just going to say I added 1 to the initial average of 21. So this year’s vintage is 22 brix.
September 24: Day 0 – 22, 20, 21 (the brix for the three tubs)
September 27: Day 3 – 23, 18, 22 (taken at 4pm, right before sugar was added)
September 27: Day 3 – 21.5, 18.5, 21 (taken at 9pm, a few hours after the sugar was added to equalize)
September 28: Day 4 – 17.5, 12.5, 15.5 (right after, I added half of the yeast nutrients)
October 1: Day 7 – 0, -.5, -.5 (right after, I add the other half of the yeast nutrients)
October 2: Day 8 – -1.5, -1.5, -1.5 (right after, I added the malolactic bacteria)

October 4: Day 10 – Press day!
Ok we made it fully dry, phew! I was worried about the additional sugar. I got a press from Oak Barrel in berkeley. I had some folks over and we made quick work of pressing. Mom, Dad, Colin, Fred, Shae (and his two friends) and Brittany where there. We had minor spillage on filling the kegs, but nothing major.

The next day, I cleaned the outside of all the kegs and moved them into the garage. This task is done. I now have 5 full kegs of wine plus a carboy, one carboy of rose and 2 carboys of Sauvignon Blanc. I need to rack the gross lees in the coming days or week.

October 14: I added 50ppm to each of the 5 kegs, and 1 carboy.

March 5th, 2024: I bottled the last batch ~48 hours prior. I hosed out the inside. I retrieved the wine thief that fell in there. And I filled with 1g of boiling water for ~30 min. I was pressurized and hissed a lot once I unsealed. I then filled 4 of the kegs into the barrel. I filled it to the very top, plus one gallon carboy, plus one liter flip top, plus one glass (which I drank!). I also added 100pm SO2 which should last it a while. So I have 2.75 gal for topping. Plus I have one keg which was untouched.

Year 9 of winemaking begins. I wanted to branch out of the recent glut of Merlot and Cabernet from my Livermore grower. I went looking for some Old Vine Zinfandel from Lodi!

About The Grapes ….
So I found a Zinfandel grower in Lodi. They are Schulenburg Vineyard, they grow around 92 tons of Zinfandel on their property, and I think they lease neighboring properties as well. Scott and Wendy were happy to sell me 1000 pounds for $850. I asked for an extra hundred pounds (for Rose), but I’m not quite sure it was there after pressing it and seeing it in the fermentors. They picked it for me themselves starting around 3am without any down payment, or even meeting me in person. It was pretty nice and trusting of them. They had it waiting for me in a big tub when I arrived, guarded by the vineyard cat:

About The Crush ….
My back was incredibly bad this year. I couldn’t lift or do a thing, so I was purely a supervisor. I drove up there on September 11, 2022 with my dad and brother in Colin’s work truck. Wow it was nice using a truck! We brought the 3 44g fermentors in addition to my fleet of tubs. I also brought a pitch fork. Scott was nice enough to move the grapes to saw horses level with the bed of our truck. We used the pitch fork to load up our various vessels. Wow, it was sooooo much faster than years past. The pitch fork moved way more grapes than you could with your hands. And putting them directly into containers already in the car prevented lifting things into the truck (or, worse, the trunk of an SUV). In years past this part kinda sucked, and this was no problem at all. Also, we easily fit the 1000# in the bed of the truck, with bed space and container space to spare. We got back to my place, and parked the truck in the sidewalk with the crusher/destemmer right next to/below it:

This allowed for the tossing of the grapes “downward” and not having to lift heavy things to shoulder height, another massive improvement. This process probably took 1.5 hours once we were set up. We filled the fermentors right there, and then used a dolly to move them into the garage. Cleanup was just hosing down the street, and cleaning the tubs in the shower.

I was worried this would be hard since I was injured, but the truck+forklift+pitchfork on the pickup and the loading from the truck into the crusher was sooooo much easier than I thought. This is a good model for future years. I dosed it in SO2 1.25tsp per bin targeting 30ppm. And I went to morebeer the next day to get yeast, yeast nutrients and malolactic bacteria.

Grape Stats
~1000 pounds (no official measurement)
25.5 Brix (probably accurate to +/- .5B)
pH 3.7 (self measurement)
1.25 tsp SO2 per bin targeting 30ppm.

September 11 – Day 0 Crushed, Destemmed and dosed with 1.25tsp (per 3 bins) SO2
September 12 – Day 1 – pitched 80g of BM45 yeast
September 13 – Day 2 – lazy
September 14 – Day 3 – lazy
September 15 – Day 4 – added ~15grams of Fermaid K per fermentor
September 16 – Day 5 – lazy
September 17 – Day 6 – 4 Brix, added ~15grams of Fermaid K per fermentor
September 18 – Day 7 – lazy
September 19 – Day 8 – 1 Brix
September 20 – Day 9 – added the malolactic bacteria

September 21 – Day 10 – Press Day
We pressed today. I rented the press (the full, large size) from OakBarrel. Man, driving to Berkeley and back today (and the next day to return) was a lot! Maybe going to MoreWine in concord would be worth the increased price.

Things went pretty easy. My back wasn’t the best, so folks (mostly Colin) did most of the work. I siphoned the fermentors to make 60% full kegs, then carried those kegs to the backyard to fill from the press. I did each fermentor into one pressing (so three press loads). Each fermentor was a little less than full which furthers my thought that I got less weight than I wanted. In the end, I have 4 kegs, one 1 gal growler, and 3 half gal growlers. They are perking in the garage, and will be racked soon and I’m afraid I will have less than 4 kegs soon, and not have enough topping wine for the barrel later.

November 17 – First Racking
I racked the 4 kegs into 3 kegs and 3 5gal carboys. I left a generous amount in the bottom to send to the carboys since I had 3 to fill, the hope is that the kegs are extra clean and the carboys get all the lees. I put 100ppm SO2 into the kegs and one carboy. So in a couple days, I need to combine the 3 carboys and various growlers into a keg for long term aging.

February 20, 2023
A day after we bottled last year’s wine, I put this wine into the barrel. The barrel sat overnight (maybe 20 hours?) empty with the lees in the bottom. Zach was in town and lended me some expertise. We hosed out the barrel to clean the lees out. Then we put (maybe .5 gallon of) boiling water to “steam clean” the inside. We sealed it with the bung and then released it after 10 min. There was a ton of pressure built up with the steam and it hissed a lot when released. After dumping the boiling water, I pumped the 4 kegs into the barrel. They fit pretty nicely. I had a 1liter from previous racking, and I added to that a 1 gallon growler, and another 1liter bottle. These were the result of pouring the end of the kegs into a bucket, and then pouring that bucket into these vessels, so they are probably really sediment-y. There’s no way these 1.5gal of wine is going to be enough for topping, so I’ll have to dig into my bottled wine for that at some point. I also added two tablespoons of SO2 to add 100pm SO2. That should protect me for quite some time so I can kinda forget about that for a while. I’ll need to add oak at some point, but those only need 3-6 months, so I’m in no hurry there. I’m really happy with the capacity. I still feel that the original grape seller “shorted” me on the 1000lbs, but I ended up with exactly a barrel plus 1.5gal, so that’s good.

So the barrel is absolutely full, it’s in a cold garage, and just needs topping, oak addition, and SO2 monitoring for the next year until bottling.

March 1, 2024
It’s been a year with the wine chilling in the barrel. Here is the topping I did over the last year:
5/15 – 3 liters
7/1 – 2 liters
8/8 – 1 liter
9/9 – 3 750ml bottles
10/4 – 1/2 gal
10/30 – 50 ppm SO2
10/30 – 32oz french oak (i think, my notes say 16oz, but i think i did two 1 lbs additions)
12/17 – 3/4 gallon
2/10 – 1 liter
2/29 – removed oak (pretty much manually, it was hard)
2/29 – 1 liter
2/29 – added 30ppm
I also did a titration on 2.29 and it shows 40ppm of SO2.

In total, I added 80ppm SO2, 2 lbs oak, ~4 gallons of topped wine.

March 3, 2024
Successful bottling day! We broke a bottle on my garage carpet, but H2O2 and baking soda cleaned it up pretty well. Another successful year done!

So begins year 7 of winemaking! I recently moved into a house, so I have much more space to work and store things. So I’m looking to level up this year. Specifically, I want to own more equipment and not rent, and I’m going to try to age in oak barrels, not steel. And since I’m increasing the quality of my work, I want a high quality grape. So I’m going back to Thatcher Bay to get their Merlot, which I think I can say has produced the best wine so far!

September 20, 2021
The grapes arrived a week or two earlier than they have with previous years. I got the call ~4 days prior saying the grapes would be ready today. So I showed up with my dad at 7:30am. Scott had 983 pounds of Merlot in a bin that we moved by hand into my storage containers. This resulted in 13 full bins, and 2 half bins, so 70 pounds fit in each bin. I fit all but 3 full bins in my car and my dad transported the rest. It took just over an hour to fully pack all the containers. I could have fit one maybe two more bins in my car, but perhaps not all three. I left with an empty half bin and two empty buckets. I wanted to fill those up too, but Scott didn’t have it ready so I left.

The day before, I drove out to Brentwood to get a Crusher/Destemmer. These weren’t super easy to find. This particular one was manual (boo), but included a chute stand (yay). I set it up in the driveway right by the containers, and my dad, Rich and I went to work. There was a learning curve to get it working efficiently, but we got it down quickly. Here is the process: Rest a container on top of the hopper on its side to slowly drop the grapes to the entry point. Spin the handle to crush and destem. Collect the crushed grapes from the chute while clearing it manually since it gets a little backed up. Also, hand pick out some stems that come through. Twice a container-load or so, open the destemming area and manually remove stems that get stuck in there. Empty buckets into the large fermentor. Hose down ground periodically to prevent staining. That’s it! We started at 10:30 and finished around 1. Cleaning was ok. I took out the blade and hosed down that with the destemmer (in the street!). I think I was able to get 97% of all the stuff of it with a hose. I dosed it with 1.25 tsp per bin right after targeting 30ppm. And I cleaned the containers later that evening with a hose and think I did a great job (I don’t want them to be sticky at all!).

I went to MoreBeer that afternoon and got the yeast. I wanted BDX like I had in 2018 with that Merlot. But apparently it’s been renamed Bordeaux Red (lame name!). I got some yeast nutrients, and malolactic bacteria.

Grape Stats
983 pounds
24 Brix (probably accurate to +/- .5B)
pH 3.55 (according to Scott)
TA .4 (according to Scott)
1.25 tsp SO2 per bin targetting 30ppm.

September 21 – Day 1 Yeast pitched around 3pm
September 22 – Day 2 –
September 23 – Day 3 Brix 20 – added .5oz Fermaid K to each 3 fermentors
September 24 – Day 4 Brix 16
September 25 – Day 5 Brix 12
September 26 – Day 6 Brix 9 – added .5oz Fermaid K to each 3 fermentors
September 27 – Day 7 Brix 6
September 28 – Day 7 Brix 2
September 29 – Day 8 Brix 1
September 30 – Day 9 Brix 0
October 1 – Day 10 Brix -1 – I added malolactic bacteria to fermentors ~24 hours before pressing

October 2, 2021 – Press Day
We pressed today. I’ve been looking to purchase a press for a few weeks no, to no avail. I thought it would be easy to scoop one of these up on the used market, but it wasn’t. Further, even the stores didn’t have what I wanted for sale new! In years past, I’ve rented a #40 with a 18.5 gallon basket. And I could do a whole fermentor in one of these, meaning I had to do 3 loads. This year, I rented a #30 with a 8 gallon basket. And just as the math would say, I did juuust over 2 loads per fermentor; I think I did 7 loads total. It was somewhat more cumbersome to do more loads, packing, unpacking, disposing, etc. But there were some benefits. Notably, it’s short enough that it will fit in the perfect spot in my garage; this is really the most important factor. Secondarily, moving it around is just so much easier. Fitting it in my car, as well. It was also sooooo much easier to do this at my house, rather than the apartment. I didn’t have to lug all the equipment up/down stairs.
There was a hose ready. One downside to the event, we overflowed some kegs and the wine kinda stained the concrete in the backyard. I hope time will fade it away. We carried all the kegs back into the garage and dumped the pomace into the green bin (which was fully taken away by the garbage truck the next day, another big win). I’m left with 4 kegs, 1 one gallon jug and 3 half gallon jugs. I’m sure those jugs will be very useful for lees replacement, and maybe topping off down the line ….

#1 Free Run
#2 Free Run
#3 Free Run
#4 Press Run

October 4, 2021 – Apple Press Day
Colin is making apple with again this year. He brought over apples again a couple days ago for press day. And he used the apple crusher I got him a couple years ago. I was focused on the wine, but I know he crushed the apples, added water, and added sugar. He also added some enzymes? chemicals? tannins? I’m not sure. He had TODO lbs of apples. I added yeast ~24 hours later. And we pressed it Monday morning in two loads. Since it was still fermenting, I couldn’t fill a keg to the brim. I filled it close to the top, and there’s another carboy of ~2 gallon. I’ll bet I have 1 keg plus 1 gallon of apple wine, likely enough for lees replacement.

October 24, 2021
In a fervor, right before leaving on my honeymoon, I really wanted to rack the wine. It’s been over 3 weeks since the pressing, and I wanted to remove the gross lees from the wine. I even racked the growlers, so they are clean (except one). I worked in my garage on a rainy day, and was able to get it all done. I have one main carboy will most of the lees in it, then another with some lees. When I get back, I’ll consolidate the 3 carboys into a keg, and use the growlers to top it off from the lost lees. I’m hopeful the lees removed is equal to the growlers I have.

#5 apple -> #6
#1 free -> #5
#2 free -> #1
#3 free -> #2
#4 press -> 3 carboys (which will then go into #3)

One thing, the apple wine isn’t fully fermented :-/ I measured its brix at about 6, which isn’t good. We’ll see what we want to do going forward. UPDATE: November 13, 2021. I consolidated the carboys into #3. I lost about 1gal of lees in the “collector” carboy. And I added two half gallon growlers into it, so I a 1 gal growler and a half gal growler. I added 30-40ppm SO2 to all wine (not apple wine). The brix on the apple wine is now 3.

February 11, 2022
One week ago, Friday 4th, I went down to Union City to buy a wine barrel for $169. It’s used, and the guy didn’t know a ton about its history, but it appears to be 10-12 years old (older than I thought), French oak, and visually looks better than I was expecting. I barely fit in the mouth of my car, but I got it home and unloaded fine.

The next day, I filled it to the brim with regular tap water in my backyard and left it there for three days. At the staves seems, the wood was visually a little wet, so it was technically leaking ever so slightly just at the ~1 hour mark. After that, there was never any visual wetness on the outside of the barrel. After 72 hours, I dumped the water (sending as much to my plants as possible), and left it in my garage, bung hole down, to dry and drain. I left it like that for 48 hours.

That brings my to today. I bought a rubber mat, to put below it, and positioned it right next to my hot water heater in the garage. It’ll weight ~600 lbs when full, so there’s no moving it! I then siphoned all 4 kegs into the barrel. This will serve as racking #2 (and very likely the final one). I added one tablespoon of SO2 to add 50ppm (1/4tsp per 6 gal = 40ppm, so 10/4 tsp per 60 gal = 40ppm). I filled it to the very brim and sealed it with the bung. This barrel will likely not add any oak flavor, so I’ll probably want to add about 24oz of french oak cubes, and put them in a sack for easy retrieval.

There was about 1 extra gallon of dregs, which I put in two half gallon growlers. Additionally, I have a 1 gal glass growler and a .5 gal glass growler. Those will serve as topping off wine when I revisit this monthly. I filled it to the tippy top, and it squirted out when I capped it (so there was NO headspace). The bung then popped off an hour later, and again over night some time. I think I need some headspace to handle the expansion and contraction, so I took out ~half of a bottle. I hope that will work.

That’s it! This is very exciting! Let the microoxidation begin!

July 2, 2022
I did a titration, and found that there was 20ppm of SO2. I’m told that being in a barrel causes more SO2 to be lost. I added almost 2tsp of SO2 to bring it to around 50ppm. I put in a large mesh sack and dropped in 1lbs of French oak cubes. I tied the top of it to some small string and ran that along side the bung and tied it to a tack on the outside. In this manner, I can fetch the bag when needed. It maaaaaay be a problem to get these oak cubes out, but we’ll see. I thought long and hard about it, and couldn’t come up a good system to put it in and out easily. I also topped it with .75 gal, one monkey head and one growler. (I think I’ve topped it once before with .5 gal since I put it in here in Feb, but I can’t find a record of that!)

February 19, 2023
After about a year, it was time to bottle. I have filled topped off the barrel periodically through this year. I haven’t kept the best notes, but I probably put 2-4 gallons of wine in there. Removing the oak cubes was expectedly tedious. I had to dip tongs into the barrel and grab them one by one from inside the mesh bag. It was not fun, and took a long time, but it was consistent and didn’t pose any serious problem. I might do that method again, unless I can think of a better way. I setup the wine pump to pump into a raised bucket just outside the garage, and then bottled from there just like I always do. There were no problems, and this approach worked well. The pump does go much faster than filling, so you gotta keep an eye to toggle it on and off so you don’t overflow the bucket. The racking cane was a little too short to get the bottom of the barrel. So when it got down there, we had to “roll” the mostly empty barrel in place to better hit the bottom. This caused the sediment to stir and “muddied” the rest of the bottles from there on out. This was an error. A better way would be to remove the orange “collar” from the cane so as to reach a little deeper into the barrel. Once that level would be reached, finish up the bottling bucket and then proceed to bottle the dregs. This will minimize the “risky” bottles.

I had some initial math problems with bottle expectations, but I think I landed in the ball park. There were 9 parties who took 24 bottles. I have 78 bottles. That is 294 bottles. That is 58.8 gallons. And it’s safe to say we drank 1+ gallons at the party. So that’s pretty close.

That’s all! We’re done with this wine. Hopefully this wine is better than previous vintages due to the year in the barrel. We’ll see in the coming years ….

We’re beginning year 6 of this wine making adventure. All the returning members rejoined (either they like the wine, or are too polite to tell me they don’t; I can never be sure). This year, we’re moving out of France, and trying a new Italian varietal, Barbera. And we have two new wine members, so I need to up the volume slightly. So, before diving into the main course of Barbera, I have a small appetizer to start with, Mourvèdre.

September 19, 2020
A couple years back, a friend referred me to the Cal Wine Broker, some guy with a mailing list that brings small wine makers to various vineyards in the Brentwood and Oakley area. His prices are cheap! This weekend, he was offering grapes for 75¢ a pound (picked for you), with no minimum or pricing tiers. I saw a couple weeks ago he had grapes for 30¢ a pound (you have to pick). Wow that’s cheap! Also, he will crush it onsite for a flat $20 fee. I was free this weekend, and it was right before the main Barbera delivery the next Tuesday (so I could press everything together). I had to bite. He offered Montepulciano, Aglianico, and Mourvèdre. Leah opted for the Mourvèdre since that was the only one she recognized. The price on this is low, and I don’t think particularly highly of this region. So, at this point, I’m not planning on blending this with the “seemingly” better quality Barbera I have coming. I’ll keep it separate for months, and then consider blending them at that time.

I met this guy at 7:30am in a gas station parking lot in Brentwood, CA with about 20 other folks. We then caravanned to Trilogy Vineyards, a gated retirement community, with a vineyard inside it …. ok. They had 6 big pallets of grapes out in the parking lot and the buyers went at it, scooping the grapes into their containers. Previously, when I did this I just scooped up everything (in Livermore, I would get the whole bin, so I didn’t really have a choice). But the other buyers here were hand picking out the good looking clusters, and leaving the rest, interesting! So I became a little more discerning on what I grabbed. I filled up four of my bins, had them weighed, and he had a crusher/destemmer right there for a small (very reasonable!) $20 fee. I dropped all my grapes in the top and they came out crushed. It was a lot of work throwing around that much grapes, but it only took about 10 minutes. This was a much nicer experience than previous years. It was cheaper, I didn’t have to move the crusher/destemmer, I didn’t really have to move my grapes to get to the crusher/destemmer, and I didn’t have to clean it, $20 well spent! I paid up, loaded up my car and drove home. I purchased some yeast and brought it up to my apartment kitchen. I dosed it with S02 (.5 tsp, I think), and then took a nap! I will add the yeast at the 24 hour mark.

Mourvèdre Stats
Brix: 24.2 (my measurement, with new refractometer)
pH: Unknown
Additions: .5 tsp of SO2 split between the two containers, targeting 30ppm (added immediately).
Yeast: D21 (30g, likely too much), added at the 24 hour mark.
Yeast Nutrients: None

September 22, 2020
I’m back at Oak Barrel after two years out in Livermore. I think the Livermore quality is better, and cheaper, but I wanted more variety, so I picked this. I’m paying $1.20 plus 5¢ to have it crushed per pound. I dropped my fleet of containers off at the shop the day before and picked them up today. I borrowed my mom’s car, and the transport was even easier than I thought. All but one of the tubs fit in the car pretty easily (I went back for a second trip to grab the one tub), and Leah and I could pretty much carry a full one without a ton of effort. We elevator’ed them up and scooped them into the big fermentors. I siphoned off 6 gallons of juice, which was pretty hard. It was so thick, and milkshake-y, that it didn’t really flow. I ended up using a measuring cup to fill up the carboy directly. I added the SO2. I had a ton of dirty tubs, but the cleaned pretty easily in the shower. It was a lot of work, and I’m tired, but none of the work was impossibly difficult. I’m pleased it went well.

Brix Problems
The sugar content was pretty high on this, which is giving me nightmares back to the 2017 Zinfandel. If the sugar is too high, it will kill the yeast and will result in a stuck fermentation. I need to avoid this. This is disappointing, since I’m paying a pretty high price for this from Oak Barrel, and this happened the last time I bought grapes from them. Officially, Oak Barrel said that the brix was 26.9. My low fidelity hydrometer showed that it wasn’t quite that high, but more in the low 26 range. The solution is to add water, something I did in 2017 and still got the stuck fermentation. Using a Pearson Square, I found that I should add 2.6 gal to lower it by one brix. Oak Barrel recommended a half gal per 100#, so 5 gal. As I thought my sugar was a tad lower, I decided to add 3. I bought spring water from the store, and poured one gallon into each fermentor. I would have loved to take a brix reading, but the water was concentrated at the top, and I couldn’t fully mix it in with the entire batch. My naive reading was 21 or so, but I think (hope) that’s just because it’s so watery at the top. I’m going to say that the brix was 25 … and cross my fingers.

Yeast Rehydration
Given my worries about a stuck fermentation, I rehydrated the yeast to improve their heath and give me better odds. I filled three drinking glasses with hot water and a splash of cold water to get it to about 105F. I then split up the yeast and poured them into the glasses and stirred it up. The glasses were 2/3 full at this point. I waited 15 minutes, then I put some of the juice in the cups. This had the dual benefit of giving the yeast something to eat to further get them up to speed, and lowering the temperature to decrease the temperature difference between the yeast mixture and the must. After another 15 minutes, I pitched the yeast into the must.

Barbera Stats
Brix: 25 (see above section)
pH: 3.45
TA: .88
Additions: a “heaping” .5 tsp of SO2 to each bin immediately after getting home. .25 tsp SO2 to Rose.
Yeast: BDX added at the 24 hour mark
Rose Yeast: RC 212 added at 24 hour mark

September 23 – Day 1 Yeast pitched around 3pm
September 24 – Day 2 A little yeast nutrients sprinkled on Mourvèdre. Barbera Brix 21.5.
September 25 – Day 3 Barbera Brix 14. Mourvèdre Brix 10 Rose Brix ?. I added 1oz of Fermaid K to the Barbera.
September 26 – Day 4 Barbera Brix 11. Mourvèdre Brix 9 Rose Brix ?.
September 27 – Day 5 Barbera Brix 10. Mourvèdre Brix 10 Rose Brix 7.

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Quick Note about brix I was using my new refractometer to measure Brix (it is a lot easier). But it turns out it’s only really useful in binary solutions, e.g. sugar and water. When a third compound, ethanol, appears, it doesn’t give accurate results. So the above Brix readings aren’t accurate. I moved to using my reliable hydrometer below.

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September 28 – Day 6 Barbera Brix 2. Mourvèdre Brix 1 Rose Brix -1. I added 1oz of Fermaid K to the Barbera.
September 29 – Day 7 Barbera Brix 2. Mourvèdre Brix 1.
September 30 – Day 8 Barbera Brix 1. Mourvèdre Brix 1.

October 1 – Press
With Covid being around, Leah and I couldn’t make this a party like usual. So we had to do the pressing all ourselves. I picked up the press from Oak Barrel and got started around 6(?) or so. This year, I was much more aggressive about siphoning. I would siphon one fermentor into a keg and at some point the levels would equal and it wouldn’t go any more. I would then siphon that same siphon into a carboy and it would trickle out a lot more. All in all, from the three bins, I pretty much filled 3 kegs with just siphoning alone! And what I pressed really only amounted to just one keg, it was pretty dry at that point.

I’ve got the pressing down pretty well. One full fermentor can fully fit in the press at a time. This makes it neat and easy, three fermentors equals three pressings. I did the pressing, and Leah collected the wine. We did a pretty good job, we’re experienced, but we still made a mess. After the three Barbera fermentors, we pressed the Mourvèdre. I didn’t bother siphoning that since those smaller containers were easier to move, and no sense separating it if there is only one keg’s worth anyway. I ended both the Barbera and Mourvèdre with half a carboy each, so in the interest of making things easy. I just blended them together now (I don’t really have 6 one gallon vessels). I also racked the 6 gallons of Rose fermenting in the bucket into a 5 gallon carboy (there was a lot of wasted lees at the bottom). At this point, I have:
#1 Barbera – Free++
#2 Barbera – Free+
#4 Barbera – Free
#5 Barbera – Press
#6 Mourvèdre
carboy (6gal) 50/50 split of Mourvèdre and Barbera
carboy (5gal) of Barbera Rose.

I also checked the brix now if full liquid form. I’m feel pretty good that it fully fermented. I think I can read -1 Brix on all wine, and tasting it was very sweet at all. Hurray!

October 20 – First Racking
I did the first racking of the gross lees today and it went very smoothly. Having an extra carboy is very useful to use the least amount of effort:
#2 Barbera – Free+ => #3
#1 Barbera – Free++ => #2
#6 Mourvèdre => #1
#5 Barbera – Press => #6
#4 Barbera – Free => #5

I then topped #3 and #2 with the other Free in #5. Then I topped the rest with the 50/50 carboy. And I collected all the dregs of all vessels into another carboy. At this point, I have all full kegs, and one very dirty carboy. In a few days that carboy will settle and I’ll rack the top of it into another carboy that fits.

I also added 40ppm SO2 to all vessels.

March 13 – Second Racking
I did these following racking:
#2 Barbera – Free++ => #3
#3 Barbera – Free+ => #4
#5 Barbera – Free => #2
#6 Barbera – Press => #5
#1 Mourvèdre => #6
The wine was dirtier than I thought. I suppose I should be doing my third racking at this point. As usual, I collected all the dregs into a 5gal carboy and will have that settle in a few days. The lees here were “flakier” than I’ve ever seen; they would harden at the bottom and they would “chip” off with the water gun when cleaning it. I swapped in my new “S” airlocks too, which I hope are better.

I took a reading of SO2 on Free++ and Free+, and they both were at about 20. Lately, I’ve noticed some of my older wine has kind of declined in quality, and I’m thinking that it’s because a lack of SO2 isn’t preserving the flavor for many years. My first wine actually tastes the most similar to how it tasted originally; and that year I mistakenly added too much SO2. So I’m trying to add more SO2, so it’s better for longer. I added 60 (1 tsp) to each of the kegs, to get up to 80 or so.

March 26 – Oaking
I added 6oz of French Oak cubes to all kegs. I added 7oz to the Free Run++, and 5oz to the Mouvedre.

August 21 Bottling Day
This vintage ended with a bottling day. Covid and the delta variant have been looming. And we were fortunate that all attendees were vaccinated, and we could find a day that worked for most. Brittany couldn’t make it, but she came the next Tuesday to bottle her share. And the Hjerpes couldn’t make it because there were fires close to their home. Other than that, everybody was there.

I started bottling the Barbera for myself first when Colin and Melanie got here an hour early at 2pm and knocked that out. Then, I sent people in to get their 25 bottles of Barbera. After the second keg of that, I switched to the Mouvedre, so people could get their 6 bottles of that. Smartly, I set up the rose with a bottle filling wand directly in the carboy, and people filled their 2 bottles of that. I was a little rushed at this point, since a couple people had to leave. Parallelizing the rose filling was a good idea. I got through that, and went back to the Barbera to fill for people who didn’t need to leave early. We probably finished at 7pm or 8pm.
Brittany bottled a couple days later, and she got the carboy that everything filled into. And I forgot it was dirty :-/ And I filled directly from the carboy. I should have siphoned it into a bucket to ensure it was clean.

After the dust settled, I had 6 bottles of Rose, 21 of Mouvedre and 73 of Barbera. And I expected about a case more of Barbera; I don’t know where it went. We drank some of it at the party, sure. But my expectations are usually more accurate than that.

I served lau lau, rice, mom’s mac salad, poi and chocolate haupia pie for desert. It was all delicious.

Onward to vintage number 5! Here’s the plan: All the previous wine club members opted to defer 17 bottles of last year’s Merlot. And that is currently sitting in 2 kegs in the wine room. I’m getting Cabernet Sauvignon this year. And I’m going to blend that with last year’s Merlot. This should result in around a 60% 2019 Cabernet and 37% 2018 Merlot (and 3% 2018 Cabernet) cuvée. Thatcher Bay sells a less heralded Cabernet grape (but for more expensive than their Merlot), so I’m purchasing that. I’ll do same process as last year, pick up grapes at the vineyard, and then crush/destem them myself.

October 25 – Harvest Day

This was by far the latest harvest date I’ve done. I was somewhat nervous it was taking so long! I picked up 787 pounds of Cabernet Sauvignon at Thatcher Bay. Fortunately, my dad and brother showed up to help with some muscle. Scott told me to show up around 11am, and we transferred the pre-picked grapes into our storage totes pretty quickly. We loaded up the car and drove back to Berkeley. Colin, my Dad, and Uncle Rich showed up to help there. I got the crusher/destemmer from Oak Barrel and brought it back. In our haste, we forgot an extension cord (and a shovel for cleanup). But we dodged a bullet finding an outlet on the root above my parking space.

We rested the machine on full totes and put an empty one in the center to collect the crushed grapes. Rather than collected the must there, we carried up crushed grapes and poured them into the larger fermenters. I thought more numerous, less heavy loads was optimal, but damn, that was a lot of weight to carry around. We crushed the grapes from 1:30pm – 3:30pm or so. Colin brought some apples (see below!) and we tried to crush them, but we might have broke a shear pin in the process. We cleaned up (a pain) and returned the machine back to Oak Barrel. It wasn’t totally clean and they made us clean it in the parking lot. After, I pulled 2 gallon from each of the three fermentors into a bucket to make some Rosé.

Bonus Wine – Apple
Colin had a ton of apples this year and wanted to make some apple wine. As is the Silla way, he got even more apples from local stores that they were going to toss. All in all, he brought 153 pounds of apples! He cut them up, removing any bad bits. And we blended all the apples. I thought the blending was a little unnecessary, but we did it anyway. It took 5-6 hours to do all this; we were done at 9pm. It was a long day. We boiled 6 gallons of water, along with 20 pounds of sugar, and poured that over the blended apples. We had two different storage totes, and they had initial Brix of 22 and 20, and perhaps 28 gallons of must. We added 2oz of Citric Acid, 1oz of Wine Tannin, 2oz of Pectic Enzyme, and 1tsp of SO2. I added three packets of Lalvin EC 1118 yeast 24 hours later (Saturday noon).

Grape Stats
Brix: 25 my measurement, so not super precise
pH: UNKNOWN
Additions: 1tsp of SO2 into each bin targeting 30ppm (added immediately).
Yeast: D80 (60g, 24 hour mark, two large packets), D47 for rose (small packet, 24 hour mark)
Yeast Nutrients: 2oz split among Cabernet, Rose and Apples. Half on day 2, half on day 5.

October 25 – Day 1 Grape pickup, crushing, SO2 added, punching 3x per day begins
October 26 – Day 2 Yeast pitched around noon
October 27 – Day 3 Brix 24, rose 25, apples were 17/15 – Added yeast nutrients
October 28 – Day 4 Brix 17/16/15, apples 16/15
October 30 – Day 6 Brix 9/10/8, apples 11/12, rose 15 – Added yeast nutrients
November 1 – Day 8 Brix 3/3/4, apples 7/11, rose 11
November 3 – Day 10 Brix 1/0/1, rose 7

November 5 – Day 12 – Press Day
The wine fermented a bit faster than years past. My parents, Colin, Rich and Seth came over and we pressed all the wine. I learned a slight improvement; after filling the press container, I could hand press the top down and fill it with more grapes. As a result, I was able to do this in 3 pressings, rather than 4. After, Colin hand pressed his apples, since it was too small to fill the press. Also, the apples aren’t done fermenting, but they are still bubbling! All in all, I was again very fortunate that I completely filled the vessels I had available. I’m waiting for my luck to run out, but it hasn’t happened yet!

November 9 – First Racking
I’m out of kegs, so I had to get a little creative with my racking plans. I took the press run keg and put it into carboys: 2 full clean, 1 half full clean, and then another that I poured the dregs into. I then put keg 2 into 3, and then 1 into 2. I poured the dregs into the original carboy, and used that half carboy to top off the other kegs. This left me with 3 full carboys (1 very dirty, 2 clean) and 2 full kegs. I’ll put the carboys in the last keg in a few days after the dirty one settles. At that time, I’ll have:

#1 Press run
#2 Free run
#3 Free run*
#4 2018 Merlot – French
#5 2018 Merlot – American
#6 Apple Wine

One thing to note: I fully filled 3 kegs at pressing, so I have no smaller vessels to top off. I added 4 bottles of 2017 Zin (the not fully fermented one) into the dirty carboy. The hope is that either (a) 4 bottles blended with hundreds of bottles won’t have any impact and/or (b) the active yeast environment will actually ferment the residual sugar in the Zin.

March 12 – Apple Wine and Rosé Bottling
Colin came over and we racked his apple wine, and the rosé. I dosed both of them with 40ppm SO2. I had prior purchased 4 cases of clear bottles for Colin, and some corks, so we were ready to go. The setup was a bit painful, but once we got going, we probably did the whole thing in 1.5 hours of actual filling. Colin and I split up the wine, and allocated a bit for the rest of the club. Additionally, I did an SO2 reading on the rest of the wine. I checked a new Cabernet (#2) and it was at about 35ppm, and one of the older Merlots (#5) and it was seemingly around 10ppm. So I added 30ppm to the new Cabernet and 40ppm to the old Merlot. That should set things for a while until the next racking.

May 2 – Second Racking
I thought this was my third racking, but I suppose it was only my second. Oops!

This racking brought a new challenge. I wanted to do the normal lees removal, but I also want to blend the ’18 Merlot with the ’19 Cab. With 2 kegs of Merlot, and 3 kegs of Cab, that means that I should put 6 gallons of Merlot with 9 gallons of Cab, to get equal blending. Also, the old Cab was previously “clean” since it was racked a bunch last year, so I didn’t bother emptying those and collecting the dregs, I just removed 9 gal of Cab, and put in 9 gal of Merlot. So this is what I have now:

#1 Empty
#2 Press – blend of oak (collected in 3 carboys)
#3 Free – American
#4 Free – French
#5 Press – American
#6 Free* – French

Also, the previous Cab was oaked, so the new blend has 40% of the oak in it, so I only need to add oak sufficient for 60% (9 gal) of each keg. So I added 4oz (sufficient for 10 gal) of oak into each keg. I blindly added 20 SO2 to all.

September 27 – Bottling Party
Things are a little different this year with Covid. As bottling is a pretty hard requirement to end the vintage. I decided not to have the bottling party at my place, but do it at my parents’ instead; they have a lot more space than us. But the main obstacle to doing that is getting all the kegs over there! I decided to bottle one keg’s worth myself with Leah a couple weeks prior; no sense in transporting that if it ends up here anyway. And we had two members unable to make it, so I kept another keg at my place to bottle myself and deliver later. That means I had to get 3 kegs to Orinda. My dad helped and drove here with my mom’s car and transporting them wasn’t as big of a deal as I thought. We did this a week before the party and were set to go when the day arrived.

At the bottling party, I immediately dosed the kegs with ~30ppm of SO2. So that gave it an hour to fully spread around which I hope was good enough. We set up seating in the empty garage, and the keg/bottling station near the drain in the driveway. We put a tarp under it to prevent staining the driveway as well. The three kegs were the above 2, 4 and 5, so there were French, American and blended oak options. This allowed people to go through the bottling and get a case of different oak and label their wine accordingly. I haven’t done that in years past. It was also noteworthy as everybody deferred some wine from the previous year to blend with this year, so everybody got 36 bottles! We tasted it at the party, it was pretty good! Leah says our best one yet. There were also no bubbles or carbonation in the final bottled wine, which has been a problem in years past.

All in all, I had a lot of worries about this day. Moving the heavy heavy kegs to Orinda could have sucked. I could have forgot a key tool at home. The heat in Orinda could have been really bad. We could have been lax on our social distancing and become sick! Fortunately, none of those worries can to pass. The entire day went pretty well. Another great year done! On to the next!

The apartment is still a mess from the bottling we did just 4 days prior, but so begins another year of wine making. I decided to go with the Merlot again this year, using the same vineyard that I’ve used twice before, Thatcher Bay Vineyard. The difference is that I’m using this as my primary wine, not my secondary bonus batch. And a big catch with that is that I need to crush the grapes myself.

I’ve been planning this for a while, and the key to this is using my Mom’s car, and filling them with as many storage bins as I could. I have four, and I asked my parents to purchase 9 more of these, and 5 smaller 32 gallon ones. I was targeting being able to fill 1000 lbs of grapes both in these bins and in the car …. I hope my math is right.

October 4th – Harvest Day
I got to call from the vineyard, the grapes are going to be available on this day. I arranged the car with my parents, and drove over there to swap cars. Bonus this year, my cousin Mike is in town and he decided to go with me for some muscle. I intended on using the front seat for two bins, but it turns out everything fit in the back area anyway. So we got to the vineyard around 9:30am and Scott already had a pallet of picked grapes (1048 lbs) ready for me to take. All I had to do was scoop the grapes out of the bin and drop them in my bins, which went pretty fast.

Mike and I loaded them carefully into the car, and we were left with one empty bin and 2 buckets. We then went into the vineyard and filled those up with slightly underripe cab with the intention of blending it. This picking sucked, it took longer to pick 102 lbs, than the transfer the 1048 lbs of Merlot. But we finished, paid up, and drove back to my apartment.

We dropped the bins in my parking spot and went to Oak Barrel to pick up the rented crusher destemmer, which was pretty large and heavy. My dad met us back in my garage and the three of us proceeded to figure out what to do. The bottom of the crusher destemmer is where the crushed grapes drop out of, and we found the square bins caught everything much better than the round fermenters. So we’d fill those up and then transfer them to the larger fermentors from there. The stems were spit out of one end, and it was amazing how fast they were processed, especially juxtaposed against my experience of manually destemming them in years prior. The crusher destemmer was messy, and random berries were flying all over the place. At one point, we missed catching the output, and I picked up the berries and juice from the ground of my parking space, but I just took the top layer. All in all, the crushing took less than an hour, it was really fast. The cleanup was almost as long. My dad helped a ton by hosing off the bins in my backyard while Mike and I carried all the must upstairs. We then cleaned the crusher destemmer which wasn’t super terrible. We drove the equipment back to the shop, and I siphoned off 6 gallons of juice to make rose and pitched yeast there.

Bonus Wine – Sauvignon Blanc
I almost forgot, Oak Barrel offered Sauvignon Blanc this year, and had some extra that they didn’t sell. Homer gave me a very good price on it, $50 for a 6 gallon carboy (it’s probably worth $130). They came on September 10, and I picked it up on the 15th. The yeast was already pitched and it was already fermenting. I gave it a week, and it fermented completely to around -1.5 (phew!). I racked it into a clean carboy and it’ll sit for 3-6 months. It was sampled at the previous bottling party and people seemed to like it!

Grape Stats
Brix: 24 (mixed between co-fermented Merlot and Cab, also number is rough due to my measurement)
pH: 3.61 (TBV measurement)
Additions: 1 tsp of S02 per fermentor (and a little for the bin) to hopefully get to 30ppm (added immediately)
Yeast: BDX (60g, 24 hour mark), D47 for rose (small pack)
Yeast Nutrients: Oak Barrel yeast nutrients

October 4 – Day 1 Grape pickup, crushing, SO2 added, punching 3x per day begins
October 5 – Day 2 Yeast pitched after work
October 6 – Day 3 Brix reading from above was around 23, I’m adding 1 to account for fermentation to get my starting Brix. Half of yeast nutrients.
October 8 – Day 5 Brix of 17
October 9 – Day 6 Other half of yeast nutrients
October 10 – Day 7 Brix of 12/13/12
October 11 – Day 8 Brix of 7
October 12 – Day 9 Brix of 6/7/7
October 13 – Day 10 Brix of 4/5.5/5
October 15 – Day 12 Brix of 0/1/1
October 17 – Day 14 – Pressing Day.
We originally scheduled to press the prior Sunday, but the Brix wasn’t low enough, and the guys at Oak Barrel talked me out of it. Heading to Florida on Thursday morning, this was the very latest that we could do it. The Brix read around 0, so we are getting pretty dry. I picked up the press from Oak Barrel and drove it home and got to work. Fortunately, Leah got home quite a bit before me, and started with the siphoning. From just one of the tubs, she was able to almost fill an entire keg! We got similar results through the evening siphoning the three tubs into three almost full kegs, for really no work.

My goal for the night was four kegs, one carboy, and one 1 gallon bottle. But we went well past that. After filling four kegs and decreasingly sized containers, it was apparent that we’d be able to fill the ever elusive fifth keg. And we poured all the smaller contains into it. So I ended up with 5 kegs total. I sprinkled some malolactic bacteria in the kegs and closed them up. Then I cleaned up with some help, and drove the press back to Oak Barrel. A further win was that we were able to get ride of all the solid pomace waste. It really seemed that there was more liquid, and less solid in this years pressing.

At this point, we have five kegs:
#1 -> Free Run
#2 -> Free Run
#3 -> Free Run
#4 -> Press Run
#5 -> Press Run

October 27 – Racking I waited a week or two, and am now racking the gross lees. I’m in bit of a pickle in the sense that I don’t have one carboy to collect the dregs to settle. It’s makes things surprisingly harder. But I settled on a multi-step solution that isn’t too much of a pain. Step 1 I racked the “top” of #5 into a 6 gal carboy, and the rest into #6. I then cleaned and racked every keg into the next higher one. And I poured the dregs of everything into #6. I then used the 6 gal carboy to top all the kegs. This was the normal difficult “3 hour” racking, and resulted in kegs 2-5 being “clean” and 6 being “extra dirty”. Step 2 A few days later, I racked #6 into 3 different carboys, with the last being the dregs. Step 3 . I let the carboys settle, and then racked them back into a cleaned and sanitized #6 taking care to “leave” the lees on the bottom. I was surprised that there wasn’t a ton of lees at the bottom. I topped off #6 with three bottles (1 merlot, 2 syrah) of older wine, so presumably, that is all the volume of lees that I removed from the entire situation. So effectively, I racked:
#1 -> #2 – Free Run
#2 -> #3 – Free Run
#3 -> #4 – Free Run
#4 -> #5 – Press Run
#5 -> #6 – Press Run

Additionally, I measured the SO2, and found they were about 10-15ppm. So I added ~40ppm to all, and packed them back into the second bedroom for long term storage. I am now done for a few months.

Rose Update: I tasted some rose a couple weeks ago, and found it was sweet to the taste. (This was well after the main wine was fully dry). I measured it then and it was around 1B. I measured it again today and it was 0B. Hopefully it will get to fully dry, and it’s just going slowly. If it doesn’t, at least I only have 5 gal of it!

February 23 – Rose and Sauvignon Blanc Bottling
Today was the day for the non-core Merlot bottling. The SB has been hazy in recent months, and I’ve taken steps to remedy that, to little affect. I tried to cold crash it. I emptied my fridge, and took out the shelving and cabinets and put the carboys in there. This was actually a lot easier, and not as inconvenient as I thought. I left it for a week, hoping to settle out particles, but I couldn’t tell a difference. Second, I added bentonite; this seemed the least aggressive and gross thing to do. I rehydrated the bentonite and tried to stir it and let it sit for a couple hours. I then poured it into the SB and rose. It seemed like a lot to pour in there. I then gave them another weekend of cold crashing. As it got to today, it didn’t look a ton different, but I wanted to be done with these. It came to 25 bottles of each. I labeled them, and put them away to give out at the wine party in a couple months. Hopefully they taste good!

March 8 – Racking #2 I racked all the Merlot tonight. The logistics were a bit easier than last time, thanks in part to that experience. I put 2, 3, 4, 5 all into the keg one below it, and topped off with the next one in line. As usual, I poured the dregs of all into a carboy. When I got to #6, it was used for topping off previous ones; I then filled two 5gal carboys, and poured the rest into the “dregs” carboy. This all worked out pretty well from a space point of view. It seems that one keg can go into three 5 gal carboys (arrowhead jugs from work). I had to squeeze a bit to clear the headspace. Now, I wait a few days and (a) put the two clean carboys into #5, (b) siphon carefully the settled “dregs” carboy and (c) top off the keg with Syrah, presumably the amount of lees left in the dirty carboy. This was a two step process, easier than what I did last October.

I measured the SO2 in two kegs, and they came to be about 20ppm, so I added 30ppm SO2 to all of them. I also tried to solve my carbonation problem. I racked using the pump, and I ran it on full blast. I had the out end somewhat splash in the container it was in. And I put the in and out in the same container and ran the pump. The point of all this, of course, is to agitate the wine to release the gas. All the while, I could see tiny bubbles flowing in the out end, and they would quickly converge if the motor was turned off. Suffice to say that I got some gas out, but I have no clue if it was 1% of 99% …. the gas just keeps coming!

Now one week later, I racked the 3 carboys into the #5, and needed to top it off with 3 bottles of Syrah (so 3 bottles of loss from lees). There is one problem, the SO2 reading is still coming out as 20ppm, where it should be 50. I don’t know what to make of that. I also oaked the kegs, and added 10 ppm SO2 (because of the oak addition).

#2 -> #1 – Free Run – French
#3 -> #2 – Free Run – American
#4 -> #3 – Free Run – 50/50 French American
#5 -> #4 – Press Run – French
#6 -> #5 – Press Run – American (after collecting in carboys)

August 18 – Bottle Party
Another successful bottle party. Everybody (except two members) showed up, and we bottled three kegs worth. I bottled my own on that day too. Everybody opted for the “next year” blending, so they took home 19 bottles. Kegs #3 and #5 remain for next vintage blending. I filled up a carboy, and put it aside and Steve, Lily, Seth and Veronique bottled theirs a couple weeks later.

Welcome to another year of winemaking! This year, I had a major scheduling conflict with my buddy Zach’s wedding at the end of September. Because of that, I wanted to select a varietal that would be early in September, so as not to conflict. So I selected Zinfandel. That turned out to be the latest varietal picked this year. It was delivered on the very day that we flew out. Fortunately, I talked Oak Barrel into holding onto the grapes for 4 days before I picked it up when I got back. They (supposedly) did the enzyme additions, pitched the yeast, and punched the cap at least twice a day.

Grape Stats
Brix: 25.3 (per the website, but they said it was actually 29)
pH: 3.92
TA: .57
Yeast: 1st Tub BDX, 2nd Tub BM45, 3rd Tub BDX/BM45 mixture
Additions: SO2, Lallzyme EX-V, OptiRed , yeast, Yeast Nutrients. All additions done by Oak Barrel, so unsure of timing
Dilution: 3 gallons of water, per tub, plus 3oz of Tartaric Acid (both due to high sugar content).

Port
On Day 6, I scooped out 6 gallons of must into a bucket. I did my best to take the liquids and solids at the same consistency as the must. I don’t want the port to be too heavy on liquid (and be light on tannins from the skins and seeds), or to heavy on solids, and not yield as much. I would guess there is 6 gallons of must, 1 gallon of solids and 5 gallons of liquid. It was 13 Brix at the time and started at 29. I added 1.5 liters of 150 proof Everclear. I think I screwed up my “gallons” vs “liters” (I needed 1.5 gallons, not 1.5 liters). So the Port might be 12.6 abv, not 23.4. I might consider adding alcohol to this later.

September 28 – Day 1 1000lbs of Zinfandel was delivered to Oak Barrel. SO2 was added.
September 29 – Day 2 Enzymes were added, and yeast was pitched
October 2 – Day 5 I picked up the must from Oak Barrel. I rented a Ziptruck and went to Oak Barrel. They had the tubs on a fork lift and dropped them in the bed of the truck. I drove home and Ben was waiting for me there (thanks!). The tubs weighed 333lbs each, so we did a controlled drop of them off the bed of the truck. Then we picked them up a few inches and put them on a dolly. From there, getting them in our apartment was pretty simple. I brought extra tubs to put half the must in to make moving them easier, but that was unnecessary. Moving the tubs, with two people was manageable. I returned the truck, and then picked up two 750ml Everclear bottles for the Port. Brix was 15 this night.
October 3 – Day 6 Morning, the brix was 13. I did the Port recipe (see above) in the morning. I did the water addition above this night. I mixed the 3oz of Tartaric Acid with the water, in a big bucket, and poured it in. I used hot water from the tap, since the water sitting in the hot water tank would have killed all the bacteria. Hopefully this doesn’t kill the yeast! I would suspect each tub has 20 gallons of liquid must, and I added 3 gallons of water, so it was diluted by 13%. Free wine!
October 4 – Day 7 Brix was 8/10/9 after work.
October 5 – Day 8 Brix was 8/8/6 before work.
October 6 – Day 9 Brix was 7/8/6 before work.
October 7 – Day 10 Brix was 6/6/6 before work.
October 8 – Day 11 Brix was 5/5/4 before work.
October 9 – Day 12 Brix was 5/5/5 before work. The fermentation is apparently stuck :-/ After work, I went to OakBarrel and purchased 60g of Uvaferm 43 yeast ($15), which, I’m told, is the best champagne yeast to restart stuck fermentations. I concocted 6 starters, in growlers with: 1/2 full of must, added water to 2/3 full, 6tbsp of sugar, and 10g of yeast. I built one “double” in my gallon growler. I covered them with plastic (and one airlock) and am crossing my fingers they take off in about 24 hours.

October 12 – Day 14 – Pressing After a discussion with my wine consultant, Beth, and an availability of bunch of friends. I decided to press tonight. The Brix is still a problem, but I figure I can move the juice/wine into the aging vessels now, and then take my time to solve the Brix problem later without risking the wine getting spoiled by the air contact. Incidentally, the Brix is now around 2/3, so ideally the previous yeast starter works and gets me to fully dry with no additional work. I rented a press after work and brought it home and set it up. I was joined by Leah, Ben and Lindsey, Shae, M&D, Rich and Brittany. We took turns pressing the wine and finished around 9:30 or so. The yield was slightly disappointing. I figured to have 4 full kegs plus maybe one carboy of zinfandel plus the 5 gallons of port. But here is what we ended up with:

I have 3 kegs (15.5), 2 carboys (6), 1 gal growler and 1/2 gal growler, for a total of 60 gallons. A few gallons will be lost with subsequent rackings (lees and sediment). Additionally, the port didn’t quite fit into the 5 gallon carboy, so I added a little Zinfandel, and squeezed it shut. Hopefully, I’ll get some ethanol to add later and make the volume work a little better.

We cleaned up, Brittany stayed late to help which was nice. And Leah and I were showered and in bed at 11:15. A lot of work was done tonight, thanks to everybody that came over, and thanks to Leah for “helping”:

October 24 At this point, the Brix hasn’t moved in quite some time, so I’m going to try to jump start it with another yeast starter. After the previous one failed, I’m going with Oak Barrel’s plan, using apple juice. I pitched another 60g of Uvaferm 43 yeast into 1 gallon of apple juice, and added another 30% of water. It started fizzing within an hour or so.

October 25 At the ~12 hour mark of the yeast starter, I added another 30% of wine to get the yeast accustomed higher levels of alcohol. After work, at the 24 hour mark. I pitched the starters into the wine, and crossed my fingers.
October 26 – I can hear the bubbling in the kegs, and the airlocks bubbles went from 16s down to 8s apart. The Brix reading is still close to 2, however.
October 27 – I did the first racking. Here is the schedule:
1 -> 4 #free run
2 -> 5 #free run
3 -> 6 #press run
2 carboys -> 2 carboys
I poured the ~1 gal containers into keg 6, to mix the yeast around so everybody would ferment. I collected all the dregs into one of the carboys, and will rack that away in a couple of days.

The lees were different this year. In years past, I would collect the lees and wait for them to settle in a few days. I would see a clear separation of wine and lees. I would then retake the wine on top, rather that just dumping it all down the drain. I put the slurry in some glass growlers, with no headspace, and checked them out the next day. I burped them to check for pressure and found they were very pressurized. After a couple burps, the top blew off:

This was really really dumb. I had no headspace so no air to absorb the pressure. I could have easily exploded the glass itself, which would have been really a mess. Next time, collect this in something unsealed, with, at least, a tiny bit of headspace.
October 31 – I’m still having problems fully fermenting my wine. Rather than do another round of a yeast starter, I’m trying another approach, heating the wine. The thought being that the yeast will be more active in wine that is warmer than the ambient 65&2103;. I got a space heater a couple nights ago and tried different arrangements to warm the wine. It had an automatic shutoff if the heater itself got too hot (probably for the best). I found this configuration was the best to warm things up:

I was running this for ~6 hours last night, and it might have been a little too efficient. When I went to bed and shut it down, the airlock of the one the heater was directly facing was red, so the wine was bubbling into the airlock. The metal keg was warm to the touch. I kept the blanket on overnight.

In the morning, I was expecting all the heat to have dissipated, and I would put the heat back on. The keg was still warm, so I took some measurements. The keg the heater was facing was still 96&2103;! a whole 9 hours after the heat was applied. I’m unsure what the temp was last night, but I would think higher. The other two kegs were around 85&2103; in the morning. I hope I didn’t kill the yeast, or worse, cook the wine. The good news is that the Brix has lowered, to 1/0/1 for the three kegs, again with a target of -2. Anecdotally, I was observing the bubbles out of the airlock, and found it around 40-60 seconds per bubble. When the heat was applied earlier, I found it was going at once every 6 seconds. So that’s a clear indicator that the heat helped increase activity. The lesson: Apply heat towards the end of fermentation to ensure fermentation completes, but don’t overdo it!

April 15th

It’s been a while since my last update, and I think missed a previous racking update. (I think!) I did the main gross lees racking and one fine lees racking, and today I just did the third and final racking. I was hoping that my Brix problem would magically solve itself over the past few months of inactivity. I was wrong, the Brix is around 1 for all vessels. I did taste it as it wasn’t a sickeningly sweet as I was fearful of, but you can taste the sweetness. Another problem that I’m trying to solve is the carbonation. I did a couple to address this. I used the pump to do the racking and I ran it on full blast. And after a particular transfer was done, I put the input and output hoses in the same vessel and cranked it up. Periodically I would stop it and you can see the tiny bubbles in the tubing, evidence that this helps remove the CO2. I also put my “wine stoppers” in the bungs and pumped the air out to make a vacuum. I could hear the bubbles “fizzing” when I removed the air. Both of these seemed to help, but the problem is that I have no notion of progress or completeness. I certainly removed CO2, but I don’t know if I got 1% or 99%.

I took SO2 readings after the racking and found they were all around 10-15 which is lower than I’ve ever seem. I added ~40 to each to get up to a more comfortable number. I actually ran out of SO2 and didn’t fully get the carboys up. So, currently I have:
#2 Zinfandel Free Run
#3 Zinfandel Free Run
#4 Zinfandel Press
2 carboys of Zinfandel
1 carboy of Port

At this point, all the work is done except for the oaking. I’ll buy oak soon and throw it in soon.

August 30th Update

The bottling date of September 29th has been picked and everybody should be able to make it. And as we’re getting closer to the date, the sweetness of the wine has been bugging me more and more. So I decided to do another yeast starter to finally get the wine dry.

My approach was slightly different than previous attempts. I dosed the wine with yeast hulls 1-2 days before that given wine was inoculating with the yeast starter. I also gave each “doubling” step 2 days, rather than one. Finally, I racked more frequently, but less at a time, to ensure that the yeast starter only every doubled (i.e. I didn’t add 5 gallons of wine to 1 gallon of yeast starter).

I started with 60g of Lalvin EC-1118, 1 gallon of apple juice, and 1 gallon of water. I started this on August 11th.

Here is my blueprint for the racking schedule. It took some thought to orchestrate this to ensure my “doubling” rule above, and to minimize “half” full contains risking oxidation. It wasn’t easy! (I topped the vessels with CO2 in 2-3 cases where static wine was exposed like this). I have two 6 gallon carbon on the left, and 4 15.5 gallon kegs on the right. Orange represented the yeast started, wine that has been exposed from a previous round to yeast. And blue represents the static wine needing to be fermented.

So what happened? I measured all the sugar levels and found they were between 0-0.5 Brix. So I didn’t do much :-/ It seemed initially, in the earlier rounds, the airlocks were bubbling very fast, but after each doubling they seemingly slowed their bubbling rate. It’s as if only the apple juice part was fermenting as it got more and more diluted with wine. They were low on SO2 (around 10ppm), so I added 40ppm to all. I’ll have to rack a week before bottling, and that will do it for this vintage.

September 29 – Bottling Day
After a struggle this year, it was time to put it all in the bottle. Ben bottled his wine a few months back before moving to Nashville, and Brittany bottled heres the previous Wednesday. Aside from them, everybody made it. The bottling was a success, filling everything with only minor spilling (and a broken glass by me!). The port didn’t go as planned. I intended on adding 2-3 fifths of everclear and grappa to up the abv to around 20%. But we added one bottle (to go along with the previous two I added to cease fermentation), and the group deemed it to harsh tasting to add more. So I ended up adding 3 750ml bottles of everclear which brought the end product to 15.1% abv. I’m hoping that the harshness mellows out in the coming months and years.

All in all, I kept about 9 cases of wine, which was somewhat sweet. And we drank about a case’s worth at the party. On to the next year …..

Welcome to another year of winemaking! After two successful (?) years under our belt, Leah and I are at it again. A few months back, we preordered 1000 pounds of Syrah from Amador, and are planning on getting a smaller batch of Merlot again if the timing works out. The past couple of years, the wine has been light in color and body, so I’m really going to try to fix that. It would seem that enzymes might help, though certain parties disagree, most notably Oak Barrel where I get the grapes.

Grape Stats:
Syrah Brix: 26.6
Syrah pH: 3.79
Syrah TA: .74
Syrah Yeast: BM45
Syrah Rosé Yeast: RC213
Syrah Additions: SO2, Lallzyme EX (4 hour mark), OptiRed (12 hour mark), BM45 yeast (24 hour mark), Yeast Nutrients ( 4 day and 7 day mark)
Merlot Brix: 24.5
Merlot pH: UNKNOWN
Merlot TA: UNKNOWN
Merlot Yeast: D254
Merlot Additions: SO2, Lallzyme EX (4 hour mark), OptiRed (12 hour mark), D254 yeast (24 hour mark), Yeast Nutrients ( 3 day and 6 day mark)
Read about yeast descriptions here.

September 28th – 1000 pounds of Syrah came at 6:30pm and we are handling the transportation better and better every year. Leah rented a truck, and Ben met us with a dolly. I brought the three big trash cans, two small buckets, and the four 16gal self storage bins that we have. As a result, the heaviest big was only 150 pounds, which is much more manageable than years past. A big thanks to Ben for showing up for the “not fun” stuff. Oak Barrel dosed them with sulfite getting to about 40ppm. We got all the grapes home and in the apartment in an hour or so and Leah returned the truck. Right after, I syphoned off 6gal of free run into a bucket which will be made into rosé. Later that night, I added 12g of Lallzyme EX to enhance the body.

September 29th – I went to Thatcher Bay Vineyards again this morning at 7am with four empty bins to get some more Merlot. They filled them up, but I carried them back to the car since I didn’t want to wait for the tractor to get back. I worked from home which was nice so I could just take them straight home. I unpacked them and took them to the patio. After working, I started to crush them. But this year wasn’t as fun as last year. There were more than a few earwigs in the grapes. I don’t remember these at all last year. I destemmed and Leah killed ’em. Leah then foot stomped the grapes and was a little apprehensive with the presumably hidden pinchers inside … I don’t blame her. She wrapped her feet in trash bags. After that, we moved the Merlot outside so that any survivors would flee. I added 120g of OptiRed and BM45 yeast to the Syrah from yesterday, two packets of RC213 yeast to the rosé, and dosed the fresh Merlot with ~40ppm of sulfite. I’ll be honest, the bugs were creepy and might make me stay away from destemming in future years.

September 30th – I added the yeast for the Merlot. I started punching the cap on this day as well.

October 1 – I moved the Merlot inside since there has been no signs of bugs left. The two bins were very cold from being outside, this might have retarded the fermentation process a bit.

October 2 – I added half of the 3oz of yeast nutrients to all musts.

October 5th – Brix reading, the Syrah was 10B.

October 6th – Brix reading, the Syrah was 5B, Rosé was 8B.

October 8th – Brix reading, the Syrah was 1B. I added the Malolactic bacteria to the Syrah and Merlot. This is the first time I’ve done it before the pressing.

October 9th – Pressing day, we started at 4pm. We did the pressing on a weekend this time, which made things a whole lot less stressful. Things went pretty swimmingly. We filled #1 and #2 with free run Syrah, #3 and #4 with press run Syrah, then a 6gal carboy with Syrah. Then we moved onto the Merlot filling #5, a 5gal carboy, a 1gal jug and a .5gal growler. I siphoned the rosé into a carboy to help protect it from the air for longer term aging. All told we have 96gal of wine (68gal Syrah, 22gal of Merlot, and 6gal of Rosé). Colin and Trevor did the bulk of the pressing, and Ben helped out a bunch too.

When pressing the wine both the Syrah and the Merlot looked really *really* darkly colored. This is very encouraging since that was one of my areas of concerns in previous years and something I wanted to correct. The Syrah has the Rosé taken from it (to increase concentration), while the Merlot did not. Since both were darker, I’m attributing this to the enzymes used.

I capped and airlock’ed the various containers and slowly cleaned up the apartment over the next few days. Note that I didn’t have an airlock for the last carboy, it built up pressure and exploded shooting drops of wine all over that side of the apartment, oops. I cleaned it up and switched it to an airlock.

That it for now. Now is time for patience. 3-ish rackings and 10 more months and this wine should be good to go.

Second Racking Update – February 4th
I forgot to write an update for the first racking, oops! It was probably done around mid November. I racked all the kegs around, and collected the dregs in a carboy and then siphoned that carboy a few days later. Pretty normal.

The second racking was on Feb 4th. I did a normal racking. I racked the kegs around, collected the dregs into a carboy for it to settle. There isn’t much in that carboy so the wine is mostly clear at this point. I tested the SO2 levels and found them around 40 or 50. I added ~20ppm to each just for safety. While they were open, I added French Oak. I got 9 4oz bags of French Oak, the good stuff. I soaked them in SO2 solution for a few minutes before dropping them in at the rate of 4oz per 10 gal. I also racked the Rosé. I did a rack-and-back into the same carboy and topped it off with the last remaining growler of Rosé. I collected the dregs and drank them that night. It is surprisingly good and crisp! Here was the racking plan:

#2 -> #1 – Free Run Syrah #50ppm
#3 -> #2 – Free Run Syrah #40ppm
#4 -> #3 – Press Run Syrah #45ppm
#5 -> #4 – Press Run Syrah #40ppm
#6 -> #5 – Merlot #40ppm
Rosé carboy -> Rosé carboy #50ppm
Syrah carboy #40ppm
Syrah Merlot 50/50 carboy #40ppm

Third Racking Update – May 20th
I just did the third and final racking, which took about 2 hours. I disassembled the “wine tower”, and did the 5 rackings of the kegs. I then topped off with the carboys, and dumped the dregs of the kegs I collected, into the carboys to settle. All told, with the wine pump, this took about 2 hours.
I also had a couple glasses of the Syrah with dinner that night … it was pretty young and a little harsh. I measured the SO2 of one carboy and saw that it apparently lost 20ppm, so I decided to add that amount to all the kegs. At this point, all the work is done; bottling is next in a few months.

#5 -> #6 – Merlot
#4 -> #5 – Press Run Syrah
#3 -> #4 – Press Run Syrah
#2 -> #3 – Free Run Syrah
#1 -> #2 – Free Run Syrah #40ppm

Bottling Day
We bottled all the wine on August 26 and 27. I rented the corker from Oak Barrel, and got ~450 corks and a bunch of bottles for those that didn’t have any. I measured the SO2 of the first two kegs, and they were both at 50ppm, so I didn’t add any SO2 to any of the kegs. I bottled 1 keg and 1 carboy, ~100 bottles, myself on Saturday and it was really physically taxing. Leah and I made lasagna that Saturday night as well. People arrived the next day and started bottling. We did the Syrah first (with people getting 30, 20, and 10 based on level). And then after that was done, we did the Merlot (with people getting 9, 6, and 3). There was a minor snafu when the Merlot was being siphoned into the Syrah as it was being filled. This created the accidental “spectrum” blend that certain people were interested in anyway. There were no major problems, holdups or spillages. I found that one person can fill 75 bottles (one keg) in 1:45. That rate can double with 2 people.

Bottling Party

 

Oak Barrel Party

 

Next Year’s Vintage – 2016

 

Now that it’s berry season, I’ve decided to make a small batch of Blackberry Port.  They were selling for about $3.50 a pound the other day at Costco, which, I’m told, is a very good price for blackberries.  I did some research and settled on using Jack Keller’s recipe.  Here is what I did:

Day 0 – I got six 18oz packages of blackberries at Costco, 6.75 pounds.  I threw them in a mesh bag and mashed them in a big pot with a potato masher.  I was shooting for a starting Brix of 25.  So with some trial and error, I ended up dissolving 6 cups of sugar into 9 cups of water and poured it in.  I added 1.5 tsp of acid blend.  I covered and let it sit over night.  The liquid volume of this is just over 1 gallon at this point.

Day 1 (morning) – I added .5 tsp of Pectic Enzyme (apparently to dissolve the fibrous material in the berries)

Day 1 (night) – I pitched the yeast on top.  Every day after that I manually squeezed out the mesh bag of berry skins.

Day 4 – I took a Brix reading and it got to 8 Brix, which was a lot lower than I was expecting.  Apparently this ferments quicker than grapes.  I poured in 20oz of grappa to arrest the fermentation.  Presuming 90%abv of the grappa (a wild guess), using the Pearson Square, that means that this is now at 17.5% abv with 8 Brix worth of sugar remaining.  That should be enough to stop the fermentation, but I’ll likely have to add both grappa and sugar down the line.  Note that this tastes terrible at this point, yeasty, silty, hot alcohol (in a bad way), and not super sweet.

Day 6 – To extend the maceration period slightly, I let the mixture sit for 48 hours after the grappa addition.  I then squeezed out the bag one last time and poured the port into one 1 gallon container with airlock, and one sealed 1 liter Monkey Head bottle.  Now we wait ….  Rack and clarify.