Vintage 2020: Chenin Blanc Cold Settling and Inoculation

I've written two blogs regarding the 2020 Chenin Blanc harvest: Vintage 2020: Chenin Blanc Harvest and Vintage 2020: Chenin Blanc Pressing at Jonathan Edwards Winery. Those two events happened on Sunday, October 11 and then on Monday, October 12. We did get a day of rest on Tuesday and then on Wednesday and Thursday it was cold settling then inoculation.
The Chenin Blanc parameters from the juice taken on Monday was:

Variety	Weight	Volume of Juice	Brix	pH	TA
Chenin Blanc	8201 pounds	655 gallons	23.3	3.09	12.1 g/L

On Wednesday, Jonathan Edwards was racking the cold settled juice into the holding tank. I went to see if I could help. I was in charge of the must pump, making sure that the holding tank did not over flow and the pump did not cavitate.

The cold settled juice from tank 2 was transferred first. Tank 2 contained mainly Chenin Blanc clone FPS-1 juice. It was interesting to note that the juice was a bit cloudy in the holding tank. The tank became completely full in the process of racking, so tank 2 contained 350 gallons of juice.

Jonathan showed me the gross lees that were left on the bottom of the tank. We don't add any yeast nutrients when we do our fermentations, so I removed three buckets of this gross lees because this is what we use as nutrients for our yeast. After that, what was left in the bottom of the tank was discharged from the drain valve onto the winery floor. I asked and was given the task of cleaning the tank. I was surprised at the amount of skins that were on the inside of the tank and it took me a while (30 minuntes?) to get the tank clean. Once the tank was cleaned the three buckets of "nutrition" was put in the bottom of the tank and the juice was returned to tank 2.
Before moving the juice from tank 1, we put a bit of this juice into tank 2 anticipating that we had more juice in tank 1 and not wanting to overflow the holding tank. Then we did the same thing for the cold settled juice in tank 1. The juice from tank 1 appeared a bit clearer. When the transfer was done we had 275 gallons that was in the holding tank. The gross lees from tank 1 looked a bit cleaner.

After cleaning tank 1, putting in the nutrients, putting back the racked juice, my day was over. I felt like a real "cellar rat"!
The following day, Thursday, October 15, I went over to the winery to inoculate the juice that was at 60 degrees. We use QA23 for the fermentation so, the first step was to rehydrate the yeast in 100 degree F water. I also removed some juice from each tank to temper the yeast once it was rehydrated. I could see that the juice from tank 1 was clearer than that from tank 2, which is what I expected.

The rehydration and tempering took from 3:20 to 4:10 p.m. When the temperature reached approximately 75 degrees, the tanks were inoculated. Jonathan asked if I wanted to climb to the top of the tank to pitch the yeast, but I demurred. Hopefully the happy yeast that we pitched into the tank will change our Brix to ethanol! Now we have a bit of a respite before our last harvest of Cabernet Sauvignon and Cabernet Franc grapes occurs.