Tuesday, November 28, 2023

Chenin Blanc Voyage into Noble Rot Wine

We have made a late harvest Chenin Blanc beginning in 2019 and have kept track of the numbers for each year.
This year, we bagged around 750 bunches of Chenin Blanc grapes in organza wedding bags and to ensure that the varmints running around in the vineyard didn't get tempted to pull at the wedding bags, we dropped the nets on the areas that we had the bagged grapes. We monitored the berries from green grapes to noble rot infected grapes and this is what it looked like:
On Sunday, November 26, we brought in a representative bunch of grapes and weighed it and extracted the juice from it. The bunch of grapes weighed 92 grams and we were able to extract 25 mL of juice from it. The initially extracted juice was greenish dark brown so we let it settle overnight.
We did sample berries from green to raisined in the harvested bunch and this is what we got:
There was no way to extract even a drop of juice from the raisined grapes to get a refractometer reading. So, one of the reasons for settling the extracted juice overnight was to get an accurate reading of the Brix by taking 5 mL of juice and diluting it with 5 mL of water and taking a reading. That worked and showed that the Brix was at 22, so doubling the reading makes the juice at 44 degrees Brix! The pH is 3.62 and the TA is 14.8 g/L. My husband gave it a thumbs up!

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