Progress of the Botrysized Chenin Blanc

On December 22, I blogged about Vintage 2023: Last Harvest of This Year and some details of the harvest, pressing and cold settling. In today's blog I will continue with the inoculation and fermentation of the botrysized Chenin Blanc.
On December 3, when we went to the winery, we saw that the juice had settled quite nicely and the heavy sediment was clean enough that we did not feel the need to rack the juice so we proceeded with the yeast hydraton, tempering and inoculation.
We estimated that we had 4 gallons of juice, so we rehydrated 4 grams of QA23 yeast in 50 mL of spring water at 100 F^o, and every 10 minutes added 15 mL of the botrysized Chenin Blanc juice. Inoculation of the rehydrated and tempered yeast occurred on December 3 at 12:15 pm.
When we came back to the winery on December 4, we saw that the fermentation had begun evidenced by the foam on the surface of the juice. On December 6, the juice was becoming more turbid, more foam was appearing and the bubbler was showing the escape of carbon dioxide.

On December 6, we took videos of the fermentation which was really humming along at this time.

By December 19, the fermentation seemed to be essentially over but there was still a little activity indicated by the bubbler. What was interesting was the color change from the start of fermentation. The December 19 photo shows that the juice was becoming a little clearer and had a lemon yellow color.
The glass carboy was a little deceptive as it appears that the sediment was about a third of the way up from the bottom, but looking more closely, the actual sediment was at the very bottom of the carboy.
Next steps include testing the evolving wine and continuing to monitor the fermentation.