Pressed the Sangiovese and The Flextank

You know that feeling you get when you've spent all day at the beach and you can't get the sand out of everything. I'm having that feeling about wine right now. After several days of pressing, cleaning, and pressing again our finger nails are looking horrible and there's a semi permanent tint to our hands.

The Sangiovese was relatively easy but getting it out of the Winepod into the press was a bit of a hastle. After my issues with the cross-threading of the press last year the press isn't really working on the pod anymore. It will take some considerable investigation to find out how to fix it. For now we just decided to take everything out of there and put in in the press. We got 9 gallons of very pretty pure Sangiovese from it.

After pressing the Sangiovese I realized that I had run out of residual sugar tests. The guy at the home brew shop mentioned that I could probably pick up some test strips from the pharmacy as diabetics commonly need to test for sugar. Great idea I thought. So asked at the counter and these days they only thing they sell are those electronic testers. What the heck I thought, the cheap tester is only 10 bucks and I  bet it would work out to be pretty cost effective in the long run. Little did I know that if the sugar level won't register on those things if it's under 20g /dL. Bummer!

Then, this morning feeling re-invigorated we decided to take on the big enchilada and press the contents of the flextank. It was quite a job, after filling about 3, 6 gallon carboys I decided that there was just so much juice that it made more sense to go back to the original plan and pump everything back into the second flextank for storage. After all, there's a reason I bought two of them and a pump and a variable volume skin, right?

So with our plan in place we started by using the new pump to get the contents of the carboys back into the flex tank. Then we started pumping straight from the bucket where we were pressing into the flextank. ~40gallons and 3 big cakes later we were done. The total wine in the flextank is about 50 gallons.