Starting the first Inoculations

Today was inoculation day for the Barbera which didn't get the cold soak and the Sangiovese in the pod. I re-hydrated 16g of Lallemand VRB yeast for the Barbera in 20g of GoFerm in 200ml of 104 degree water. I then put the beakers in the must to let them settle down to the temperature of the must and then pitched the inoculate into the must. Now the fun begins.

I also took some must out of the 20gallon buckets to make room for the cap that will be rising soon. So the current status is:

- ~16-17 gallons of Barbera with no cold soak but with Laffort VR Supra tannin and Lallzyme EX, Booster Rouge and Opt-Red. I've also added medium toast French oak chips to this one.

- 5 gallon bucket with mix from Barbera which was cold soaked but with no VR Supra and the one from above.

- 15-16 gallons of Syrah / Sangiovese where the Sangiovese is about 20%

- 15 gallons of Sangiovese with no additives in the pod

- 16-17 gallons of Barbera with cold soak, Booster Rouge, Opti-Red, and Lallzyme EX

- 70 gallons of Syrah and Chennin Blanc (8%) with Cold Soak no additions yet

- 5 gallons of Syrah and Chennin Blanc with Cold Soak and no additions yet

Later in the day I added 5g of Lallzyme EX to the Syrah in the Flextank and 7.5g of Fermaid-K to the inoculated Barbera must. Then 6g of Fermaid-K to the Sangiovese in the Pod and 2.5g of Fermaid-K to the pail. If the must of the second 20g vat of Barbera and the Sangiovese / Syrah is high enough temperature I may inoculate them later in the evening. I'm pretty sure that the must in the flextank won't be ready for inoculation until tomorrow.

End of the night, I'm inoculating the second Barbera must and the Syrah / Sangiovese must, as well as the overflow 5 gallon container of Syrah / Chenin Blanc.

For the Syrah / Chennin Blanc must I'm using some Lallemand Syrah yeast and Uvaferm 43 for the Syrah / Sangiovese.

Initial Additions

Today I made an addition to one of the 20 gallon buckets of Barbera giving it 10g of Laffort VR Supra Tannin. I wanted to see what the influence would be like compared to the one without tannins added. I also added 1.5g of Lallzyme EX to both vats of the Barbera. Between the cold soak, tannin and enzyme to break down the skins we should get some good color and flavor extraction.

Also added 8g of Opti-Red and 8g of Booster Rouge to each of the Barbera buckets, and the Syrah/Sangiovese blend. I've also taken the yeast out of the fridge and am planning to innoculate tomorrow if the temperature of the must is right. Also thinking of fermenting one of the Barbera's with Oak Chips or Spirals in it to see if I can get a similar effect to fermenting in a barrel, may be fun.

Harvest - Day 2

Day 2 of Harvest. We decided to focus on getting the Barbera. We managed to get 4 tubs of that and one tub of Chenin Blanc. We probably could have picked the Chenin Blanc sooner and gotten some more white but by the time we got to it the wasps were in full control of it and really going at it. At our risk we decided to evict a few of the wasps and grab as much as we could. It wasn’t the best quality but it was sweet and could be used in the Syrah to co-ferment and hopefully bring up the sugar level slightly.

After the crush of the Barbera and Chenin Blanc I got the following measurements:

Barbera – Two Brute buckets

Brix 25, pH 3.23 (ratio 260.82)

Chenin Blanc – Co-Fermenting with Syrah

Brix 24, pH 3.44 (ratio 284)

After sulfite and everything in the buckets I distributed 100lbs of dry ice to all the vats except for one Barbera vat to test the difference.

The plan now is to cold soak the grapes for a few days then think about some additions to them. My tentative plan is to add lallzyme to the Syrah to maximize the color extraction. Then inoculate soon afterwards with ICV-D254. For the Sangiovese I won’t do any color extraction and try the Brunello yeast BM45. For the Barbera I’ll try Enoferm VRB.

Harvest - Day 1

With 14’ U-haul truck ready we left the HD Wines world domination HQ at 5am. Our harvest troop was Monika, Robyn, Scott and Michael. We started with the upper block of Syrah which bird nets were placed. There was still a whole lot of fruit we had to leave because of the uneven ripening. A lot of issues with the fruit were caused by over growing where the clusters were too close and picked up some mold or took some of the energy away from its neighbors. After careful picking we ended with 13 tubs of Syrah and a few tubs of Sangiovese.

When the grapes started getting warm, we got out of there and made it back by 11:30. Once we got back and started cranking on the crusher/destemmer we noticed that we needed to do some on the fly sorting while feeding the crusher. After getting through all the Syrah we had filled about 80% of the 78 gallon flextank with it plus was able to fill another 20 gallon container with the last of it and a small portion of Sangiovese that was left. I then proceeded to sulfite everything with 4 grams of sulfite in the winepod containing 15 gallons of Sangiovese, 5 grams in the 20 gallon bucket containing the Syrah/Sangiovese, 8 grams in the flextank holding the Syrah.

Around 6pm we were finished with the crush and the cleaning took another 3 hours. Just before quitting for the day I did the final must measurements and they came in as follows:

Syrah – Flextank:

Brix 21, pH 3.46 (ratio 251.40)

Sangiovese – WinePod

Brix 22, pH 3.40 (ratio 254.32)

Syrah / Sangiovese blend – Brute

Brix 23, pH 3.54 (ratio 288.22)

So unfortunately the Syrah as a little light on the sugar but was pretty well balanced from an acid perspective. Some papers I have read seem to indicate that pH squared times brix should be between 220-260 for a good balance.

Final Vineyard Sanity Check

Final sanity check on the sugar levels. Even though the week had been very warm the brix didn’t jump up as much as anticipated. Given the uneven ripening though I was concerned about going another week so I decided to stick with the plan and harvest on the 28^th.

Preface

On 22-July I got word that friends of a friend were looking for someone to take their vineyard through harvest in exchange for wine in return. After inspecting the vineyard it was clear that there was a lot of fruit and even if we pulled in a very small percentage we would have a big harvest. The vineyard hadn’t really had much maintenance in the past few seasons and the vines looked almost wild in places. With some advice from Michael and Coleman we decided to spend several weekend sessions doing as much fruit dropping as possible to ensure that we got the best fruit as possible. The hope was by thinning out the fruit we could accomplish two things (a) let the vines focus on ripening the best fruit and (b) make it easier at harvest time to get the best fruit.

After a few sessions with Monika, Tim, John, Olivier, Michael, Coleman, Jason, Crystal, and Scott we had cut back a substantial amount of fruit. The fruit was already experiencing veraison by the first weekend of August and the brix was around 17. Our attempts to put bird nets up were futile given that the vines were allowed to grow down from the first trellis line and were producing some fruit that was hanging close to the ground and canes that were preventing us from getting the net underneath the vines. So after putting up nets on one block and realizing that we may still get bird damage from underneath, we decided to put up reflective streamers and balloons to repel birds for the rest of the vineyard.

After a heat wave the middle weeks of August the brix shot up quickly and with the brix showing around 20 I made the decision to harvest on the weekend of the 28-Aug.