Chardonnay Harvest Day 2

This is a very tardy posting about the fate of the newly harvested Chardonnay after pressing. The Chardonnay that we harvested on October 5 sat in three plastic barrels, one 30 gallon blue plastic barrel and two 5 gallon food grade pails totalling approximately 40 gallons of juice.

The juice sat from Thursday until Saturday, in the plastic containers in order to drop the heaviest of grape parts. On Saturday, we transferred the best portion of the settled juice into three 15-gallon stainless steel kegs.

We took juice samples from each of the three kegs and the numbers were:

Variety	Sample Date	Brix	pH	TA
Chardonnay - Keg 1	October 7, 2023	18.8	3.40	9.4 g/L
Chardonnay - Keg 2	October 7, 2023	18.8	3.42	8.7 g/L
Chardonnay - Keg 3	October 7, 2023	18.8	3.3	11.6 g/L

Our next step was to inoculate the kegs with our rehydrated and tempered yeast and we did that on Sunday, October 8 at 1 p.m. We used 42 grams of D47 in 420 mL of water at 100 degrees F and let the yeast sit for about 30 minutes. After that time had elapsed, we put in 150 mL Chardonnay juice to allow the yeast to acclimate to their new environment. We did this juice addition 3 times. With each juice addition we let the mixture sit for 10 minutes. We added a total of 450 mL of juice. When this tempering was done, we inoculated the three kegs at 2:00.
When we checked on the fermentation the next day, the bubbler was happily bubbling away! The fermentation had begun!