The fruit was really good. The farmer who grows it, is very meticulous and takes very good care of the vines, the only thing that could have been a little better would have been a slight lowering of the yield through a green drop or some other more aggressive pruning. There's a lot more labor involved in that. What I found was some really nice fruit but far too many small clusters with different ripeness than the larger sized clusters. So I had to just leave the little guys on the vines.
At 4:45 in the morning when I was getting ready to drive to the vineyard it occurred to me that many people believe that wine making is glamorous. I say that because whenever someone finds out that I do it they usually say something like "wow, how glamorous" What they don't understand is the there's a lot of hard back-breaking work that really goes into making wine. I'm in awe of farmers who dedicate themselves to growing good quality fruit. It is truly a labor of love.
So after about 3 hours of picking fruit I had enough fruit to start my garage adventures for the year.
After bringing everything home and running them through the de-stemmer, I was able to fill a 20 gallon Brute container and anther 7gallon bucket. My plan is to do ambient fermentation on the smaller bucket while innoculating the Brute in the usual way.
After letting everything sit I took my measurements:
Brix: 25
pH: 2.84
TA: .62
I decided that I wouldn't do any additions and stay with a pretty light touch this year. Barbera can become pretty harsh and acidic tasting. So this year I won't do a cold soak or extended maceration I'm just going to do the basics with it and see how it comes out.
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