We brought in our late harvest Chenin Blanc on Tuesday, November 19. We might have had about 50 pounds of fruit which gave us around 4 gallons of very dark juice. We emailed our friends and mentors Charles and Kareem Massoud of Paumanok Vineyards.
Originally, we had the juice in a 54 degree fermentation chamber for settling for a day, but Charles advised that the settling should be done under much lower conditions so on Wednesday, November 20, we moved the carboy into a fermenter where we set the temperature to 38 degrees. The carboy sat in the cold fermenter until Sunday, November 24.
In the 5 days of settling the juice resolved itself from a dark olive green color to a lighter yellow color.
The result of the cold settling amazed us. We thought we would still get a dark juice, but it clarified to a nice yellow color!
What was left behind in the sludge was most of the undesirable dark pulp. We racked the clarified juice over to a 5 gallon keg.
When we took the numbers on the clarified juice, it appeared that we lost a bit of tartrates during the cold settling:
Brix = 25
pH = 3.5
TA = 9.1 g/L
We let the juice come up to 54 degrees overnight and then inoculated the must with VIN13 on Monday, November 25 at 3:45 p.m. Our next task is to carefully monitor the fermentation so that we can stop it at the desirable level of residual sugar in order to create the moelleux style that we are hoping to achieve.
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