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.