Racking Our Late Harvest Botrysized Chenin Blanc

On December 7, 2025 we harvested our late harvest Chenin blanc, which is a wine made from botrysized grapes. The conditions must be just so in order for this good form of botrytis fungus to infect the grapes, leaving the grape berry to look remarkably like a raisin, dehydrating and concentrating the sugars and the acids.
We brought in 6 lugs of grapes still in their organza bags and proceeded to press the juice out of the bags. We were able to get slightly more than two gallons of juice with a starting Brix of 32.
We began fermentation with a yeast called SM102 which is known to be a slow fermenter and also not able to ferment the high sugar content of the juice once the alcohol level reaches 12%.
On Monday, August 10, we racked the finished wine away from its lees (dead yeast) and were able to get two gallons of wine which we are storing before we bottle.

We dedicate half of a row in our vineyard toward this effort and the result is two gallons of racked Chenin blanc. In the glass, the color was a golden amber and the taste was sublime. It still needs some bottle aging, but it is well on its journey to become a true representation of a late harvest botrysized Chenin blanc.