Kicking Off Chardonnay Fermentation

On Saturday, September 23, we harvested our Chardonnay. We had a very small harvest of Chardonnay and we are still trying to fine tune our process procedures. One of the parameters was how to keep our juice from turning brown, the sign of oxidation of the phenolic compounds in the grape. A step we added to our procedure was to take one teaspoon of potassium metabisulfite and dissolve it into 1 gallon of distilled water and put a portion of this solution into a spritzer. When we got ready to stomp on the mash bag, our spritzer-in-chief, Barry,

would spritz the solution onto the mash bag. With just this minor tweak, the juice remained a green color as it went into the carboy.
On September 27, we put the cold settled juice, pictured above into two 5 gallon tanks to warm up to 60 degrees F for the next phase of our process. The color of the Chardonnay juice was much clearer by comparison to the Auxerrois juice.
On September 28, we took 40 mL from each of the two 5 gallon kegs, labeled Chardonnay-1 and Chardonnay-2, to run some tests.

Here are the results:
          Chardonnay-1
          Brix = 19
          pH = 3.0
          TA = 9 g/L
          SO₂ = 50 ppm

          Chardonnay-2
          Brix = 19
          pH = 3.0
          TA = 8 g/L
          SO₂ = 50 ppm
The juice pictured in the glass is the starting color of the Chardonnay. We like it already. We could be a little biased.