Chardonnay Fermentation Experiments

Our harvest of the Chardonnay occurred on September 28, 2019. Since we had such a small amount of grapes, we were able to handle this fermentation in our basement and our friends helped us to extract the juice by stomping on the grapes. The juice went by gravity flow into our basement into the waiting stainless steel kegs where the first step was the cold settling of the larger pulp matter.
We harvested about 290 pounds of Chardonnay, which turned out to be approximately 26 gallons of juice, enough to try three small experiments on fermentation with different yeasts. We chose X16, CH9 and D47 for the fermentations. Our goal is to see if there is an organoleptic difference imparted by the different yeasts on the resulting Chardonnay wines.

Here is what we know from the product data sheet of X16, CH9 and D47:

Yeast Strain	Fermentation Characteristics	Aromatic Characteristics
X16	→Rapid fermentative kinetics →Alcohol tolerance up to 16% per volume →Tolerance to low temperature fermentation (53 ℉) →Low nitrogen requirements →Tolerance to low turbidity →Low production of volatile acidity and H2S	→Very high aromatic production of white peach, white flowers and yellow fruit
CH9	→Alcohol tolerance up to 16% per volume →Fermentation temperature: 57 – 60 °F →Average nitrogen requirements →Short lag phase	→Fresh almond and hazelnut, toasted bread and citrus fruits
D47	→Alcohol tolerance to 15% per volume →Low nitrogen demand →Short lag phase and moderate fermentation vigor →Low to moderate production of H2S →Ideal for barrel fermentation	→When left on lees spicy, tropical, citrus notes develop and the wine is said to have a silky persistence

The fermentation step of the wines inoculated with CH9 and D47 took more than three weeks to go to dryness. The fermentation inoculated with X16 took about 6 weeks to complete because we kept the temperature around (53 ℉). We took the fermented wine data and it looks like this:

Variety	Yeast	Volume of Wine	pH	TA
Chardonnay	X16	12 gallons	3.24	12.8 g/L
Chardonnay	CH9	6 gallons	3.20	10.4 g/L
Chardonnay	D47	6 gallons	3.15	13.2 g/L