Bottling Our 2023 Late Harvest Chenin Blanc

On December 1, 2023, our friends, Mary and Barry came to help us with the last harvest of 2023, the botrytized Chenin Blanc. Barry brought over his apple press and we used that to juice the botrytized grapes. We had a modest amount of juice that we were able to squeeze out from our last harvest, it didn't quite fill a 5 gallon carboy. We let the juice cold settle and on December 3, the cold settled juice was deemed clean enough, so without any racking, we inoculated it with our yeast of choice, QA23.

On December 6, we noticed that fermentation had begun and by December 19, fermentation had possibly reached an end.

The finished wine was stored in the carboy and kept in the darkness. On October 11, we racked the wine into two carboys to get the finished wine off of the lees. The wine went into one 3 gallon carboy and half of a one gallon jug.

On December 3, we combined the racked wine back into a clean 5 gallon carboy and prepared to bottle the wine using gravity.

We used 375 mL Bordeaux style bottles and hand bottled the finished wine. We ended up with 37 bottles of 2023 botrytized Chenin Blanc.
We are looking forward to harvesting our 2024 late harvest Chenin Blanc!