Vintage 2018: Cabernet Sauvignon and Cabernet Franc Harvest

This retrospective analysis of our 2018 harvest is moving along very slowly on my blogposts. Shortly after we finished up with the Chenin Blanc harvest, we harvested the red varieties, our Cabernet Sauvignon and Cabernet Franc. We planted only 2 rows of each variety as a test so this harvest, our very first harvest of reds, was a small one.
The morning didn't bode well since it rained (did I mention that this Fall has been the rainiest ever!) but by noon, the sun had come up and our original harvest time arrived. Harvest began on Saturday, October 20 around noon and finished up at 1:45 p.m. We had help from 3 of our friends and their 2 tweenagers.

When all was said and done, our crew harvested 7 lugs of Cabernet Sauvignon and 6 lugs of Cabernet Franc.

When the data were collected for our reds, this is what it looked like:

Varietal	Brix on August 25, 2018	Brix at Harvest	Harvest Date
Cabernet Sauvignon	11	17	October 20, 2018
Cabernet Franc	13	18.5	October 20, 2018

This question then became, what to do with the red grapes. We decided that the Cabernet Sauvignon would be destined to be a rosé and we would vinify the Cabernet Franc into a red wine. One of our friends loaned us his destemmer/crusher so, the following day, we were fortunate enough to have 2 more of our friends come to help us with the destemming and crushing of the reds. (Sidebar: I really wanted to pull off each individual grape from the rachis by hand, but guess who said "no".)

The destemmer/crusher made quick but messy work of the 13 lugs of red grapes we needed to juice. The destemmed and crushed grapes went into two 30 gallon plastic fermenting barrels, one for each variety. Phew! Harvest is over!

Wine Masters: a New Series

Now that the crush of crush is over, my husband and I have been slowly decompressing. My husband found a wonderful series called Wine Masters. Season 1 is all about France that includes vignettes of family run wineries in the Rhône, Loire, Burgundy, Bordeaux, and Alsace.

Although the season was quite a challenge for us, watching this series was a good way for us to relax and also be inspired by these people who are farmers first and wine makers as a consequence of their farming.

Vintage 2018: Chenin Blanc Harvest

Our Chenin Blanc harvest is a lesson and a cautionary tale to others. Many things conspired to make this harvest less than what we had planned for:

• We rolled the dice and hoped for an Indian summer to keep on ripening our Chenin Blanc. When we took the Brix reading on September 27, around the time we were harvesting our Auxerrois and Chardonnay, it was at 16 Brix. We hoped that letting the grapes hang a little longer would be beneficial.
• We were still in the process of freeing up the space in our fermentation chambers in the basement to accommodate the Chenin Blanc harvest. Our bottling of our 2017 vintage didn't occur until October 10 and 11, bumping right up to our harvest date of October 14, 2018.
• Instead of an Indian summer, Mother Nature indulged us with rain:

  Date	Inches of Rain
  September 25-26	2-3/4 inches
  September 28	1 inch
  October 2	1-3/4 inches
  October 7	Drizzling all day
  October 11-12	2-3/4 inches
  October 13	Drizzling all day

When people say that rain is not good for grapes, believe it! We were trying to get a bump in Brix reading thinking that hanging the Chenin Blanc for 2 more weeks would give us that boost in sugar, instead, the grapes suffered with rot and the Brix needle did not significantly move.

Varietal	Brix on September 27, 2018	Brix at Harvest	Harvest Date
Chenin Blanc	16	17-18	October 14, 16, 17, 18, 19, 2018

Our friends came to help us harvest on October 14, picking grapes from 5 rows of Chenin Blanc. Instead of the 3 tons that we had calculated prior to the rains, we ended up with more like 500 pounds of grapes.
The lesson here is, if there is rain in the future, harvest! Also, make sure that bottling occurs way ahead of planned harvest dates!

Vintage 2018: Auxerrois and Chardonnay Harvest

All was well with our grapes at the end of August. The summer warmth accelerated sugar import to the grapes and our white varieties were looking good. I wrote a blog about how things stood: Vintage 2018: End of Summer.
It looked as if the Cabernet Sauvignon and the Chenin Blanc were at a similar sugar level. We still had all of September for ripening and some of October as well.

Varietal	Brix on August 25, 2018	Brix at Harvest	Harvest Date
Auxerrois	13	18	September 17, 2018
Chardonnay	13	17	September 30, 2018

The Auxerrois, as is typical of that variety was the first we harvested, because we saw that we would be in for rain. The next grape we harvested was Chardonnay.
We fermented our Auxerrois with QA23, the yeast that we typically use for our Chenin Blanc, inoculating the must on September 21, 2018. The fermentation went rather quickly and by September 30, it appeared that the fermentation was over. We saw nothing to gain with leaving the Auxerrois sitting on lees, so on October 11, we bottled 1 case of 750 mL and 2 cases of 375 mL wine in hock style bottles, used in the Alsace.
With the Brix reading being so low for the Chardonnay, we decided to turn this into a Pétillant Naturel, or Pét-Nat, for short. We had a successful trial balloon last year when my husband decided to turn a small amount of our Chenin Blanc into a Pét-Nat so this year, I was all in on the Pét-Nat band wagon!

Stay tuned for the fate of the Chenin Blanc and our red varietals I'll be writing about in future blogposts!

Bottling our 2017 Vintage

We've come a long way since we bottled our first vintage, our 2015 Chenin Blanc. I wrote about it in my March 31, 2016 blog which I called We Bottled Our Wine. At that time, we used nitrogen to push the wine from the keg and a beer gun to put the wine into the bottle, which we then corked. The blogpost has detailed information and photos to show how we accomplished this to bottle a mere 1 case of 750 mL and 2 cases of 375 mL bottles.
Here are a few photos from our 2016 setup:

Our wine has been steadily increasing to the point where this year, my husband (he is Procurement) bought a Mori filler and an ELVAmac Rapid 15 corker. We received our Mori filler on July 9th, so there was no excuse for us not to bottle sooner, but as with any new equipment setup, there is a learning curve, so we put off confronting this task until the 11th hour!

Here is the setup in 2018. There are many similarities to the original setup, but now we are tethering the filter housing.

Once we had the setup, we tested the Mori filler with just water. My husband found a small leak in the filler that he and our supplier had to troubleshoot. We were finally ready to bottle on Wednesday, October 10. We were really bumping up to our harvest day, October 14, Sunday and we ran into a problem. Our filter kept clogging. Troubleshooting involved putting in another 0.45 micron filter, which again clogged and then stopping for the day to gather our thoughts. It doesn't help to work then tired.
The next day, we decided to try our 1.0 micron filter, which will leave behind all yeast and particles larger than one micron. When we did that, we had no problems! We were in bottling production!

VinoCalc by Jonathan Musther

My husband recently came across a site designed especially to help winemakers. The site is called VinoCalc and it was created by Jonathan Musther. Here is what a static photo of the site looks like with the many calculations that can be made:

We found it to be an excellent resource with explanations for what the calculation is about. For example, the calculation for Molecular SO₂ looks like this:

I wanted to spread the word about this site, so I emailed Jonathan Musther and he graciously gave me permission to write about VinoCalc on my blog.
Here is a link to the VinoCalc site:
VinoCalc
Thank you, Jonathan!

Getting Ready to Bottle

Among the things that is making this harvest a little crazy is the fact that we haven't bottled our 2017 fermentation yet. Before we bottle, we wanted to do some blending trials. Since air (or oxygen) is the enemy of wine, my husband has a method of using nitrogen to push over wine in a keg into the graduated cylinder that we are using for our trials.

This is a close up of the fitting that goes on the keg. There is a moment where the keg closure on top must be removed and the fitting with the siphon put in it's place.

The entire operation is done under nitrogen so that the wine is exposed to as little oxygen as possible. Once we got the amount of wine we needed it was time for the blending trials.
Blending trials should be in a comfortable environment. We also had water and crackers to cleanse our palate between tastings.

Our blending trials consisted of various amounts of our Sussreserve, grape juice that we had saved from our 2017 harvest, would add some sweetness to our Chenin Blanc wines. During the year that our Sussreserve was in the keg under nitrogen, it had achieved a syrupy consistency. We plan to add no more than 8 g/L or less than 1% to our wine, blending it before we bottle.

Chardonnay 2018 Harvest

We harvested our small crop of Chardonnay this past Sunday, on September 30 with a group of stalwart friends who came to the vineyard at 8 a.m. All 8 rows of Chardonnay vines were culled for the grapes that made it to harvest. (I will tell this sad story in another blog post). The grapes fit into 6 lugs and it took us until 9:45 a.m. to harvest this crop.

We went home and did our typical second step which is to use a tweezer to remove the bad grapes from the good and to put the cleaned cluster into a clean lug. This took us from 10 a.m. to 1 p.m. It's kind of an onerous task, but our friends are obliging and we get a chance to while away the time by talking stories. For example: who was the only President to have a Ph.D? (Answer: Woodrow Wilson).
So, from 6 harvested lugs, we ended up with 5 cleaned lugs. From past experience, we know that 1 clean lug of grapes is approximately 20 pounds so we had about 100 pounds of grapes. Our friend, who helped us to harvest volunteered his children and their friends who came for the weekend to help us with the next step, stomping the grapes.
Here is a photo of the Future Winemakers of America.

The procedure to prepare for stomping is to shed shoes and put on food safe booties. Once this is done, it is into the fermenting tub to stomp on the grapes. Each person who stomped got to taste the resultant juice.

When all the stomping was done, we had nearly a full 23 liter glass carboy (about 6 gallons). This carboy went into the cooler to chill overnight.
We think the Future Winemakers of American had a good time and we hope that this event is something that they will remember. We thank our friends who came to help!
Here are the numbers for the Chardonnay:

	Brix	pH	Titratable Acids (TA g/L)
Chardonnay	17	3.35	7.8