Cabernet Franc Vinification: First Racking

This is the first year that we are trying to make a red wine from our small harvest of Cabernet Franc. Here is a short recap. Our friends came to harvest the grapes on October 20th. On the following day, some other friends came to help us with the destemming and crushing of the grapes. The Cabernet Franc was inoculated on October 22 after an overnight maceration. This overnight maceration is done to extract the anthocyanins, the red color that resides in the skin of the grapes.

We inoculated the must with the yeast strain, F15. The fermentation lasted 5 days so by October 28th, juice had morphed into wine. We took a little of the wine out into a glass to test and taste. The wine, as my husband likes to put it, tasted like jet fuel. Newly made wine doesn't really have the flavors that one expects from a wine that has been aged. The color, also was a little disappointingly pale. We transferred this wine that we had fermented in a plastic barrel into a 7 gallon keg to sit on the lees.
First racking: We left the wine on the lees from October 28 until November 9. Then we used nitrogen to push over the Cabernet Franc from the 7 gallon keg into a 5 gallon keg. After we topped the 5 gallon keg, we had about half a gallon left. The color of the Cabernet Franc was decidedly darker.

The Cabernet Franc will rest in the 5 gallon keg. We will monitor the resting wine periodically and top it off with the wine from the gallon jug. We hope that we can achieve a style of wine that we once tasted in Ontario when we went to Visit François Morissette at Pearl Morissette. François had fermented this Cabernet Franc in stainless steel. What we remember about his wine was that the aromas that came out of our tasting glass was like violets and the flavor reminded us of a delicate Pinot Noir!