Grand Cru: An Inspiration

Last night, my husband and I watched a movie called Grand Cru, a story about Pascal Marchand's journey to become a vigneron. The name had a special resonance for us since we went to Ontario in 2012 and visited a few wineries and then became a part of Canadian Thanksgiving at Mary's home. It was there that we learned of Tawse Winery from Mary's nephew and first heard of Pascal Marchand. So, it was with interest that turned into inspiration that we watched this documentary.
The film follows one season in Burgundy, 2016, when the vineyard was hit with a hailstorm and the weather proved to be challenging for organic/biodynamic farming. But throughout the film are depicted, Marchand's respect for Nature and his adoption of some of the traditional modes of viticulture (horse drawn weeding) and winemaking (pigéage---a classic french wine-making method where the grapes are stomped down in open vats by foot).
When harvest time came, my husband and I perked up since the film showed the picking crew carefully harvesting the grapes and cleaning the clusters in the vineyard. After the clusters were brought into the winery, other people were there to separate only the best grapes from the clusters.

We can relate to how Mother Nature has the upper hand (our friend Charles Massoud would say "Mother Nature is the senior partner"), we can relate to the cleaning of grapes in the vineyard and the cleaning of grapes in the winery, but we also can relate to the satisfaction of working with nature and discovering the wonders each day brings.

Fun Factoid: Wine List on the Steamer Maine

It's getting to be that time of the year for a bit of holiday cheer. Nothing ponderous today, just a look back at some of the history of where we live, here in Stonington, Connecticut.
Right in front of our home are the tracks for the high speed Acela and Amtrak. Before the tracks came in the early 1800's, travel between Boston and New York meant a sea voyage around Cape Cod and Point Judith or the alternative, an uncomfortable and slow stagecoach ride.
The first railroads spread west and south from Boston, reaching Providence where the choice was once again, steamer or stagecoach. Once on the steamer in Providence, the ships went around dangerous Point Judith to Stonington, Connecticut, where travelers caught another steamer for the trip down the more tranquil waters of Long Island Sound.
The story of the construction of the railroad between Boston and New York is fascinating¹ with names such as J.P. Morgan and Rowland Gibson Hazard, one of the major landowners in New England, at one time possessing around 1,000 acres prominent in this endeavor.
But before I digress too much and for those interested in how the railway came to be, the first reference is a good one.
The second reference is from the New York Public Library digital collection and is this menu from the Steamer Maine, circa January 1, 1901, part of the fleet of the Providence and Stonington Steamship Company.²

Some of the familiar brands and their prices that can be seen on this menu is Moet & Chandon, Veuve Cliquot, and Mumm's. Definitely something that will add cheer to Christmas imbibing, especially at 1901 prices, of $3.00 for a quart and $2.00 for a pint.
What a different world of travel it was back in the 1800's!³

References:
1. Brian L. Wallin, Down to the Sea by Rail: The Narragansett Pier Railroad, On Line Review of Rhode Island History.
2. New York Public Library (NYPL) digital collection. Stonington Line Menu.
3. The Official Guide of the Railways and Steam Navigation Lines of the United States.

Synthetic Wine/Vinous Alchemy?

I am reading an article from Meininger's Wine Business International titled Laboratory wine: a breakthrough or a travesty?. It was published in July, 2016, so now this information is more than 2 years old.
Mardonn Chua and his colleague Alec Lee, founded Ava Winery, a San Francisco-based start-up whose aim was to replicate famous wines. They believde that creating synthetic wine was a chemistry problem, not a wine problem. Replicate the molecules, replicate the wine.
Here is the rationale of Dr. Simpson, the founder of Cara Technology, who developed stabilised flavour standards – capsules full of chemicals – used to educate tasters to recognise individual flavours and aromas:
Once it’s clear which chemicals are most significant, “you’ve got the recipe. When it comes to these experiments in wine, they’ll add in some acidity, some sugar, some alcohol, so it’s a base. You then add the odour chemicals on top, and you’ve now got a colourless glass of water that has exactly the same flavour compounds as you’d find in real wine.”
Fast forward to December 2018, Meininger's Wine Business International has an update on Chua and Lee's Excellent Adventure in an article called Synthetic Wine is On Its Way. The duo, now including Josh Decolongon identified and isolated the individual flavour compounds of a 1992 Dom Perignon using gas chromatography and mass spectrometry and other equipment. Their intent was to replicate the flavor profile of the 1992 Dom Perignon it without the use of a single grape.

Somewhere along the timeline, the trio shifted their focus from wine to whiskey and renamed their Ava Winery to Endless West.
Their first effort, a beautifully packaged effort called Glyph, is already on sale in a small number of bars and specialist shops.
In a recent tasting, at the annual Bragato Conference in Wellington, New Zealand, Wither Hills winemaker Patricia Miranda told Stuff.co.nz:
“In terms of the taste and aromatics they need to keep developing but they are on the right path. I believe the whisky was very good in terms of aromatics and mouth feel, the after taste as well...”
References:
1. Meininger's Wine Business International, Laboratory wine: a breakthrough or a travesty?, July 18, 2016.
2. Meininger's Wine Business International, Synthetic Wine is On Its Way, December 2, 2018.

The Aroma Sensory Space of Chenin Blanc

My husband is continually reading about wines and how to make them. Our vineyard is mainly comprised of Chenin Blanc plantings ad recently, he sent me a link to this:
Modelling the sensory space of varietal wines: Mining of large, unstructured text data and visualisation of style patterns,¹ a freely available research publication from Scientific Reports.
What the authors of this research did was to mine the most comprehensive and data-rich sources of publicly available information on South African (SA) wines, notably John Platter's Wine Guide to South African Wines. Platter's wine guide began in 1978 and contains yearly entries from some 1,300 SA wine cellars and 15,000 individual wines.
This data mining study used a novel application of a data visualisation technique, known as formal concept lattices and mined Platter’s data from more than 2,500 Chenin Blanc wines that were produced over a 7-year period, 2008–2014. Their goal was to model the wine style patterns with a focus on the aroma sensory characteristics of the wine.
Chenin Blanc was entered into Platter’s in three style classes:

• unwooded dry (no noticeable wood sensory character and residual sugar content not exceeding 5 g/L)
• wooded dry (noticeable wood sensory character and residual sugar content not exceeding 5 g/L)
• wooded or unwooded semi-dry (RS content more than 5 g/L and not exceeding 12 g/L)

In this data mining experiment, the authors used Sauvignon Blanc as a control because the sensory characteristics of Sauvignon Blanc are well documented and based on established sensory and statistical methods. The dataset was mined for aroma attributes, all non-sensory words were removed, and duplicates were eliminated. The final dataset consisted of 266 different aroma sensory words for Chenin Blanc and 250 different aroma sensory words for Sauvignon Blanc wines.
The experiment revealed some sensory attributes located more towards the Sauvignon blanc side, and others more towards the Chenin blanc side of the lattice. The central region (labelled as Shared in Fig. 1) consisted of a large number of attributes that were common to both varietals. Attributes appearing further from the centerline or more to the sides of the diagram, are more unique to Sauvignon Blanc or Chenin Blanc.¹

One caveat about the research is that generated hypotheses are the result of algorithmic (and human) pattern-finding in the data, and non-existent patterns may be found.
To validate the results that the authors discovered through the use of formal concept lattices, the authors applied the standardized text data to traditional statistical methods. This standardized text data included terms that were mentioned 50 times or more. The following table shows a list of aroma sensory attributes associated with Sauvignon Blanc and Chenin Blanc.¹

The data showed that complexity was the key in Chenin Blanc aromas. The following descriptors were associated with unwooded dry, wooded dry, and wooded or unwooded semi-dry Chenin Blanc.

Descriptors	% Unwooded Dry	% Wooded Dry	% Wooded/ Unwooded Semi-Dry
Oak, rich, citrus, spice, vanilla, savory, creamy almond	18%	73%	9%
Tropical, fresh, apple, guava, apricot, lemon, honey, mineral, acid, juicy, melon, peach, floral, lime, pineapple, quince	56%	31%	13%

The above table shows the aromas associated with the different styles of Chenin Blanc wine. This can be a guide to the Chenin Blanc wine style that the winemaker is aiming to produce. For us, since we haven't used any oak in making our wines, we can attest to the lemon, quince, mineral, acid, honey, and I would also add passionfruit aromas that our wines exhibit. Another thing that this data mining research shows is the plethora of descriptors that have been used to describe the aroma of Chenin Blanc wines.
References:
1. Carlo C. Valente, Florian F. Bauer, Fritz Venter, Bruce Watson & Hélène H. Nieuwoudt, Modelling the sensory space of varietal wines: Mining of large, unstructured text data and visualisation of style patterns, Scientific Reports, Volume 8, Article number: 4987 (2018).

NEWA Network for Environment and Weather Applications

Post harvest is a time when my husband and I reflect on the year that we have just been through. So far, we have 6 years of tending vines and every year is different. In talking with Charles Massoud of Paumanok Vineyards, no two years are the same. But, with each passing year, we can learn something.
We are not alone in feeling that this year was very challenging, for us, rather devastating. According to Cornell Agritech post Veraison to Harvest, written by Chris Gerling and Hans Walter-Peterson, It’s Not the Heat, It’s the Humidity. And the Rain. And the Clouds. And the Fruit Flies.
This first line in this article begins:
"I come to bury 2018, not to praise it. I mean, yuck. New York agriculture presents challenges every season, but this one bordered on ridiculous."
Were they reading my mind? Although this article talks about conditions in New York, it could very well have been the conditions we experienced in southeast coastal Connecticut.
Further in the article was this:
Again in 2018 we were in desperate need of a warm, dry September and October to boost maturity and ease disease pressure. Spoiler Alert: no dice.
Maybe it was the damage already done by the humidity (Figure 6). Maybe it was the rain, which never left for more than three days in a row.
Maybe it was a combination of these factors or other factors that were harder to perceive, but for whatever reason, sometime around September 15th the rot index went from suboptimal-but-manageable to Zombie Apocalypse, Vineyard Edition.
Again, very relatable. We also hoped that an Indian summer would help us to keep ripening our fruit, but yes, what we had instead was the Zombie Apocalypse.
So, the question is, how can we better manage our crop? One very helpful website that my husband located is the
NEWA Network for Environment and Weather Applications.
The site looks like this:

The tabs on the top of the page include: Weather Data, Pest Forecasts, Station Pages, Crop Management, Crop Pages, Weather Stations, and Help.
We will be referring to this site frequently.

Thanksgiving Homage

In early November, we went to the North Fork of Long Island with our friends to visit Paumanok Vineyards. This has been an annual trek for us since 2016 when we were able to share our first vintage, the 2015 Chenin Blanc with Charles and Kareem Massoud. The Massouds are always so welcoming and lavish in their hospitality. This year, we went to Long Island on two of the most beautiful fall days in 2018. We were welcomed by Kareem and taken to their outdoor balcony overlooking their vineyard.

In a few minutes, the outdoor balcony was filled with all manner of comestibles to pair with the wines that we would be tasting. This year, we brought our 2017 Chenin Blanc Pét-Nat, 2018 Auxerrois, 2017 Chardonnay, and a 1997 Palmer Merlot to celebrate their purchase of Palmer. Our friends brought a bottle of Millton Chenin Blanc from their trip to New Zealand. Charles and Kareem brought out their Minimalist Chenin Blanc, Minimalist Chardonnay, and 2015 Barrel Aged Chardonnay.

As the day wore on and the sun began to set, we moved indoors to continue sampling wines, cheeses, and enjoying the stories that Charles told. Charles brought out a 2014 Blanc de Blancs, 2015 Cabernet Franc, 2013 Merlot, 2014 Assemblage, and a 2012 Late Harvest Sauvignon Blanc.
This year, we celebrated Thanksgiving with a few of our dear friends who have helped us throughout our growing season and beyond. We wanted to pay homage to our friends on Long Island by pairing our Thanksgiving meal with the wines from Paumanok.

As we imbibed the wine and grazed our way through the starters, we recalled the beautiful day in November sitting on the balcony at Paumanok having a great time. Our friends also provided us with cheese and jams that they brought all the way from Croatia and reminisced about the vacation they spent there. There was a lot to be thankful for.

Wishing You a Wild and Happy Thanksgiving

Vineyard work is put on hold to celebrate Thanksgiving. Actually, the temperatures in the Northeast is supposed to be at a hundred year low for Thanksgiving. While working in the vineyard, we run into a variety of wild life. Recently, my husband took this photo of cedar waxwings that is just perfect for a Christmas card.

Our hunter found this shot of a very healthy bobcat with it's prey, a hapless squirrel, on his trail camera. Our hunter also got lucky a few days ago when he scored this beautiful deer. He was smiling from ear to ear and we were quite happy as well because our hunter gives us some awesome meats from the deer like breakfast sausage and venison hot dogs to name just a few.

Vintage 2018: Fall Chores

To say that this fall is quite a deviation from the norm is an understatement. On Thursday, November 15, we had our first snowfall. Since we live along the coast, we were under the mistaken impression that our snowfall would be a mixture of rain, sleet and snow which would melt very quickly. However, as early evening came around, the white stuff began to fall and we ended up with between 3-4 inches of snow!
Our plan to work in the vineyard on Friday took a back seat when the winds blew and it just didn't seem like a good idea to go to the vineyard. However, we couldn't neglect the work we had to do for 2 nice (40 degree weather) days in a row and we had friends coming to help us, so on Friday, we went back to securing our netting for the coming winter.
Without help, one person can do one row in 2 hours and 45 minutes. With one persons help, that time is reduced to 1 hour and 30 minutes, and with 3 people working, one row, which really consists of two 800 feet worth of netting can be done in 45 minutes!

This is our second year at securing netting. Last year, we thought that the best thing to do was to secure the netting to the trellis wire. When spring came around, we found that the wind had blown one side of the netting and caught on the anchors on the other side. It was a mess. This year, we are trying some thing different. We have always used grapevine rubber bands for the various securing and tethering activities that we do in the vineyard. Our strategy this year is to put the rubber band very close to the anchor clip that holds the netting. We hope that this weight will keep the netting from getting caught on the netting on the other side of the trellis.
Our anchor clips are spaced (should be) 4 feet apart from each other. By trial and error, we learned that the best way to get the netting as tight as possible is to begin rolling the netting at one end of the row, and then move to the third anchor clip and roll the netting back to the second anchor clip. There will be eight feet between anchor clips that have been rubber banded. We'll see in the spring how our method held up. Meanwhile, we have just 10 more rows of netting to roll up. (For those of you keeping track, for one person that would equal 137.5 more hours of work!)

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!

Vintage 2018: Post Harvest Recap

Our 2018 harvest is now safely fermenting away. We have already bottled our 2018 Auxerrois! We had very good luck with last year's attempt at Pét-nat (Méthode Ancestrale) so, we've turned our entire 2018 Chardonnay harvest, all 6 gallons into Pét-nat and also another 6 gallons of Chenin Blanc as well. Our Cabernet Sauvignon is fermenting away to become a rosé and our Cabernet Franc has finished fermenting.
It seems like a long time ago, this time last year, when we were experiencing a beautiful Indian summer that lasted way into December only to culminate in a cold snap just in time for the Christmas holidays. New Year 2018 brought a weather event that the weather forecasters called a Bomb Cyclone.
There was a warming of temperatures in February and for a fleeting moment, we thought that we could begin our pruning chores, but March brought a month of storms that seemed to occur once a week for the entire month! The rains and the cooler weather during the spring lead to a delayed budbreak in the vineyard.
Summer brought heat like we'd never experienced before with little rain, so we needed to deploy the irrigation system in early July. On many days, the feel like temperatures hit the high 90's with occasional feel like temperature exceeding 100 degrees! The summer heat wave, while hard on vineyard workers, were great for the grapes and the Brix began climbing!
Alas, the end of summer brought rain, rain, rain like we'd never seen before and that was devastating to our harvest. In keeping with tracking the important phenological events in our vineyard, 2018 gives us more data points:

There are still things to do in the vineyard to button it up for the end of the season. And the rainy days keep on coming!

Cabernet Franc Fermentation

After our friends helped us with crushing our Cabernet Sauvignon and Cabernet Franc, we put the crushed grapes into 30 gallon plastic barrels overnight to extract some color (anthocyanins). We tested the juice from both of the varieties:

Due to the low Brix in the Cabernet Sauvignon, we decided to turn that into a rosé. We had about 6 gallons of juice and we inoculated it with VIN13. For the Cabernet Franc, although the flavors and the Brix were on the raggedy edge of being acceptable to ferment, we decided to try our hand at making a red wine from the destemmed and crushed grapes. After consultation with some friends in the business, we decided to ferment the Cabernet Franc using the yeast F15. F15 is a yeast can yield fruity and round, aromatic wines. The yeast also produces glycerol which can lead to wines with a good mouthfeel. When we began rehydrating the yeast, the smell was slightly earthy and a little offensive. We inoculated the Cabernet Franc on October 22 and decided to put a plant seed starter warming pad on the bottom of the plastic barrel on October 24 to warm the must. The seed starter warming pad is at just the right temperature, between 70 and 98 degrees F.

The heating pad was just the ticket! The must was not too cold and not too hot and yielded this fermentation kinetics graph of the Brix (y-axis) versus date (x-axis):

All told the fermentation lasted 5 days. We put the grapes into the mash bags and extracted the wine into a 7 gallon keg. We may have about 5 gallons of wine which we will rack in the coming days into the appropriate 5 gallon keg. Since we don't have oak barrels, our wine will not have the oaky flavor.

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