Update on the Fate of Our Chardonnay Experiment

On September 28, 2019, with the help of our friends, we harvested a small amount of Chardonnay. We thought we had about 290 pounds of grapes. Our friends helped us to stomp on the grapes which we put into mash bags as whole clusters and collected the juice as gravity flow into the kegs waiting in our basement. When this process was done, we had juice in three kegs. The largest amount went into a 15 gallon keg and we thought we had around 12 gallons of juice. The remaining juice went into two smaller kegs each containing around 6 gallons of juice.
The experiment we conducted with this small amount of juice was to see how three yeasts, X16, D47 and CH9 affected the aroma and flavor profiles of the resultant wine. We inoculated the kegs on October 3, 2019 and the fermentation took over three weeks to come to completion. While the X16 and D47 inoculated wines were in a temperature controlled fermentation chamber, the CH9 was fermented outside of the chamber since we didn't have enough space for it.
I blogged about the properties of these three yeasts on January 11, 2020 in a blogpost called Chardonnay Fermentation Experiments. In May, we checked the sulfur dioxide levels of the three kegs and added some potassium metabisulfite where necessary. The wines sat on the lees until November 18, when we took the numbers for the finished wine:

Chardonnay/Yeast	pH	TA	SO2
Chardonnay/CH9	3.11	6.0 g/L	27 ppm
Chardonnay/D47	3.00	7.9 g/L	11 ppm
Chardonnay/X16	3.07	7.3 g/L	41 ppm

On December 8, 2020, we racked the wines off the lees into clean kegs and let it warm to "room temperature" in preparation for bottling. My husband then cleaned all of the components of the bottling line. Sanitation is key to good bottling! My husband also calibrated the filler to accommodate the different bottle types that we were using.
We bottled our Chardonnay on December 12, 2020. Here is the setup of our bottling line.

In the above photo, we used argon gas to push the wine that was in the keg. The keg coupler when open allowed the argon into the keg to push the wine into the tubing which went to the 1 micron filter. The pressure gauge was there to ensure that the appropriate amount of pressure was going to the filter. If the filter got clogged, the rising pressure on the gauge will indicate that problem. Next, my husband opened up the top of the filter to allow the first of the wine to flow out and ensured that there were no bubbles trapped in the filter. Prior to bottling, we blew compressed air into the bottles to get rid of any particles if they were there. Once everything checked out we were ready to bottle.

We could fill 6 bottles at a time. I filled the bottles and my husband corked the bottles. It was a smooth 2 person operation. When all the Chardonnay was bottled, we had the following:

Chardonnay/Yeast	Number of 750 mL bottles	Number of 375 ml bottles
Chardonnay/CH9	21 bottles	0
Chardonnay/D47	20 bottles	0
Chardonnay/X16	3 cases	2 cases

So, what did our experiment show? The Chardonnay fermented with X16 and D47 had great aromatics. The X16 smelled like apricots and orange blossoms while the D47 had an aroma like pineapple. My husband and I both didn't detect any aroma from the CH9 and we think it may be related to the fact that the fermentation occurred outside of the temperature controlled fermentation chamber. The next step is to see what bottle aging does to both the aroma and the flavors. Can't wait!