Vintage 2020: Next Steps for Our Barbera

It turned out that harvesting our Barbera on October 28, 2020 was the right thing to do. Later that evening, the temperatures dropped and although there didn't appear to be rain in the forecast, that was what we had. Then on Friday, it snowed! Here is a picture taken at Jonathan Edwards Winery on Friday when we went to do the punchdowns of our Cabernet Franc and Cabernet Sauvignon.

We finished picking off all of the grape berries from the rachis of the Barbera on Friday and then put it into the food grade plastic trash bin to macerate. This is the process of getting out the color molecules, the anthocyanins from the skins of the Barbera. We let it cold macerate from Friday, October 30 to Wednesday, November 4, 2020. On Wednesday afternoon, we decided to begin our fermentation of the Barbera. We used the yeast F83. We assumed that we might have about 9 gallons of Barbera so we used the entire package of F83 which contained 8 grams. We rehydrated it in 100 mL of water at 100 degrees F for 20 minutes.

After the rehydration, we tempered the yeast with the Barbera juice and added the 100 mL juice in two aliquots at 10 minutes for each of the additions. The temperature of the must was 66 degrees so at the end of the second addition of the must, the temperature of the yeast/must mixture was at 73 degrees F.

We inoculated the must with the rehydrated and tempered yeast at 3:15 p.m. Now, it is a matter of punching down the Barbera and patiently waiting for the juice to turn into wine.