This year we conducted an experiment in the vineyard. We still have a few rows of Chenin Blanc that are not producing enough fruit to warrant putting up netting, so we resorted to our tried and true method of putting wedding bags on the scattered Chenin Blanc grapes. We had about 500 wedding bags in the vineyard and decided to leave them on the vine after we harvested the bulk of our 2019 Chenin Blanc on October 14.
Our goal was to see if we could make a sweet wine, in the style of Domaine Huet Vouvray Le Haut-Lieu Moelleux. So, we left the grapes on the vine until it was more than a month past our last harvest. On Tuesday, November 19, we went to harvest the Chenin Blanc. We went to the land at 2:30 and finished harvesting all the wedding bags at 3:45. The more time consuming part was ahead. We had to debag the grapes and stomp them!
Here is what our late harvest Chenin Blanc grapes looked like:
It's not the prettiest looking grape and had undergone several freeze/thaw events but they were still intact. We resorted to our typical stomping of grapes and got perhaps 4 gallons of juice.
We were so surprised that the juice was almost black in color. Looking on the Internet, however, showed that this is kind of typical for late harvest juice. We took the numbers for the juice and here is what we have:
Brix = 25
pH = 3.52
TA = 11.2 g/L
We initially had the juice settling in a 54 degree environment, but upon advisement, we lowered the temperature to 38 and are continuing to setting the wine. I'll give updates on our experiment so stay tuned.
No comments:
Post a Comment