Chenin Blanc Juice Coming Home

In a typical year, our Chenin Blanc harvest is much more than we can handle so the juice gets fermented at Jonathan Edwards winery. But this year, the amount of fruit that we harvested was low enough that we were able to bring it back to our industrial space.
After pressing our grapes, Jonathan Edwards and his crew held our juice for us and did the cold settling step. On Wednesday, October 25, we went back to the winery with our tank in tow.

When we got to the winery, Zak had the pump and hoses all set up to clean the tank. He showed us how to use the cleaning ball to get to all of the surfaces of the tank.

This step did not take very long at all and soon we were pumping the juice from the two stainless steel barrels that they were in, into the tank. Zak set up the sight glass so that we could see the color of the juice we were pulling over. We typically take some of the settled pulp to serve as food for the growing yeast. After we were done with transferring the juice, we tipped the barrel over into a bucket. We might have lost about 3 gallons of settled pulp in the process.

The next step was to put the tank with the juice into our truck. Zak put the tank in with care. We were off!

We inoculated our Chenin Blanc at 4 p.m.

Approximately 120 gallons of Chenin Blanc is being fermented at our location!