We Bottled Our Wine

The bottling setup was completed, tests were done on the wine, we are running out of bottling preparations, only one thing left to do---we must bottle the wine!
I think there is always a little fear and trepidation when attempting something for the first time. My husband had purchased all the equipment that we needed to bottle our wine.

We had nitrogen gas equipped with a single stage regulator with two gauges, one for measuring the tank pressure and one for measuring the pressure which was attached to a brass y-splitter that went to the Sanke keg as well as the beer wand. We first did a test of the system with water in one of our Sanke kegs to test for any leaks in the system. In the photo below, the other Sanke keg holds our wine.

We did discover a small water leak where the tubing met the Sanke keg, so my husband tightened the fitting. The next thing was to connect the system to the filter.

We also hooked up our beer/wine dispensing wand to the other end of the filter and tested this setup with the Sanke keg that had water in it. So, the first thing that we bottled was water. We went the whole nine yards and my husband corked the bottle of water.

The moment of truth. My husband switched the Sanke kegs and we were off and filling! When all was said and done, we were able to fill one case of 750 mL bottles and 2 cases of 375 mL bottles. Chenin Blanc 2015!

Preparations for Bottling

We are getting ready to bottle our first vintage of Chenin Blanc. We took some final measurements before bottling and did a few "blending trials" with our sussreserve. Here are the numbers before bottling:
     •   pH = 3.02
     •   TA = 10.0
     •   SO₂ = 40 ppm
My husband has done the setup for our bottling in our basement where our wine is currently in our refrigerator. We will be taking our keg out of the refrigerator so that our wine and our bottles are at the same temperature.
After tasting the wine, my husband is once again of the opinion that the wine is like "jet fuel" and is in a dumb phase. What I can say is that the wine is very acidic but I hope that it will mellow out over time.

Annual Rock Crop Harvest

The warm spring has been keeping us busy. We have a punch list of things we need to get done so we started with pruning and laying down our canes which took us from March 1 to March 17. After that, we went through the vineyard to remove the grapevine cuttings. So far so good. Next task: annual rock crop harvest. We have come a long way since this photo taken on June, 2013.

This time, it took us only 2 days, Tuesday and Wednesday, to pick up our rock crop. Here is my husband dumping our rock harvest at the end of the day yesterday.

2014 Clos de la Cerisaie Anjou

We had a lot of charcoal grilled steak last week so from some of the leftovers my husband made a steak wrap and we drank this 2014 Clos de la Cerisaie Anjou with the wrap. The wine was very dark purple in color and tasted to me of black cherries and blackberries. I have to confess, it kind of reminded me of Luden's Black Cherry cough drops. I don't know, maybe I had a sore throat when I drank the wine and had some kind of taste flashback.
This wine is a Kermit Lynch import so I went to their website to learn more about the wine made by Chateau D'Epire. We have had the 2014 Chateau D'Epire Savennières before and found that it paired very well with oysters.
The nice thing about this Clos de la Cerisaie Anjou is that you can get it for less than $20.00, so it is a nice price for a Loire Cabernet Franc!