# Syrah from Carneros



## Luse_Cellar (Sep 16, 2016)

*Syrah and Grenache from Carneros*

So this morning I picked about 140lbs of Syrah from Carneros to make my first wine. While this is my first wine, I am currently going to school for enology and have worked harvest in a cellar before. I also grew up around winemaking but this will be the first wine that I actually make all the decisions on. At any rate, it's cold soaking with about 35ppm KMBS, 5lbs dry ice, and some medium toast oak chips currently. In a few days I will add some DAP and some fermaid before inoculating with RP15. Will go through primary mostly whole-cluster but some hand de-stemming will happen every punchdown depending on how things are tasting. Cap will be punched down 2-3 times a day in the primary fermenter (32ga Brute) until almost dry then pressed off and put to french oak for ML and aging. Pretty excited to see how my theoretical knowledge pays off in the real world.


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## Treeman (Sep 17, 2016)

Looks great! I'm curious to follow a thread on whole-cluster ferment. If you can, Please try to elaborate your impressions of the stems through out the process. 

I.e. What tastes are you evaluating during punchdowns to determine if/when you will remove some stems.


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## zadvocate (Sep 17, 2016)

Possibly a dumb question, so you do not crush at all? Just put The whole cluster in?


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## Luse_Cellar (Sep 17, 2016)

Treeman said:


> Looks great! I'm curious to follow a thread on whole-cluster ferment. If you can, Please try to elaborate your impressions of the stems through out the process.
> 
> I.e. What tastes are you evaluating during punchdowns to determine if/when you will remove some stems.



Thank you! I haven't quite decided why I'm doing a whole cluster ferment and I would have preferred the rachis to be a little bit more lignified (brown/woody) but I think it will be OK. I'll be sure to update as fermentation goes on. 



zadvocate said:


> Possibly a dumb question, so you do not crush at all? Just put The whole cluster in?



There is no such thing as a dumb question! Basically I put the whole clusters in straight out of the picking bins, and they will stay pretty whole until I start doing punchdowns. I'm going to have to be careful to not break the stems up a bunch or else I will get a tannic nightmare but we'll see what happens. I'm leaving them whole for a few reasons. For one, they had to sit in my closed brute in the back of my truck for a few hours in 90* sun, so I wanted to keep the berries as intact as possible to avoid any unknown microbes from taking off. For two, I'm hopeful that a small percentage of berries will stay intact until pressing and that there will be enough CO2 for them to partially go through carbonic maceration (this more than likely won't happen but maybe I'll get lucky). Additionally, I want to avoid harsh tannin extraction from the seeds, and seeing as how I don't have a crusher/de-stemmer it was gonna be difficult to crush without breaking open some seeds. This is also why I'm pressing off early and doing a cold soak: the cold soak gives me a few days of aqueous extraction which doesn't pull much of anything out of the seeds, meaning by the time I'm close to the end of fermentation I will have plenty of skin extraction. Then, I can press off early to get the seeds away from the ethanol and avoid extracting too much from them. I'm treating this Syrah similarly to how many producers treat Pinot, mostly because I tend to enjoy "pretty" wines more than big wines.


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## zadvocate (Sep 17, 2016)

Please do update often I'm very curious about this. What do you mean by big and pretty? Just curious what your definition of those are. Thanks


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## Luse_Cellar (Sep 18, 2016)

zadvocate said:


> Please do update often I'm very curious about this. What do you mean by big and pretty? Just curious what your definition of those are. Thanks



I will! There isn't anything for me to update with right now as it's just cold soaking currently so there really isn't anything happening but soon enough I will inoculate and then it will start getting interesting. I'm really excited to see how it shapes up as fermentation starts going. I'm a little worried about H2S since I don't have the means to add much oxygen to the must and Syrah is known to have sulphide tendencies... I'm hoping it will work out OK though. 

Hmm well this is a good point, most of the ways I go about explaining this are rather left up to interpretation. "Pretty" to me is like a nice lighter-style 100% Pinot, with a fruit-forward style, mostly neutral oak aging with a small percentage of new French oak, not real tannic but the tannin that is there is well integrated. A long finish but not a very offensive wine overall. And by the way I say 100% Pinot because many commercial Pinots have a good portion of Cab, Alicante Bouchet, Merlot, or some other heavier red varietal added to them to bump up color and tannin.

"Big" to me would be mostly the way that many Cab Sauvs are made: 15-16% alcohol, lots of new (and often American) oak, so much tannin that your mouth feels like sandpaper, and a relatively short finish but overall a very offensive wine. Most cabs from Napa are made in this style, and I have to say I've hardly ever liked most of the ones I've tried. That being said, my assumption is that these kind of wines need to age quite a long time before they will be good and maybe I haven't had them in the right setting. I'm not sure if that really translates across text properly but this is how I view things.


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## zadvocate (Sep 18, 2016)

Thanks that makes perfect sense to me. Personally I like both types, pinots pretty and my cabs big. I'm newish to wine and still learning. I was in Sonoma this summer and tried a lot of very good Pinot so I have some good point of reference. Making my first wine from real grapes this year and starting with a cab and a Zin/PS field blend. Look forward to your future posts. Thank you.


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## stickman (Sep 18, 2016)

Just curious if you have the brix, pH, and TA for the must? Did you happen to look at seed color? The grapes look very nice in the photo.


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## Luse_Cellar (Sep 18, 2016)

zadvocate said:


> Thanks that makes perfect sense to me. Personally I like both types, pinots pretty and my cabs big. I'm newish to wine and still learning. I was in Sonoma this summer and tried a lot of very good Pinot so I have some good point of reference. Making my first wine from real grapes this year and starting with a cab and a Zin/PS field blend. Look forward to your future posts. Thank you.



Awesome, sometimes I'm pretty unsure of how to explain things ha. What wineries did you go to, and what were your favorites? That's great, that sounds like fun! I haven't had too many Petite Sirah's but I love Zin. Did you start a topic for your wine?



stickman said:


> Just curious if you have the brix, pH, and TA for the must? Did you happen to look at seed color? The grapes look very nice in the photo.



I don't have numbers yet. Preliminary readings looked like 26* brix, pH is around 3.7 and I don't have a titration setup. My dad is the owner/operator of a small winery and is making a little bit of the same fruit, we picked it all at once so he will have all the numbers for me tomorrow for his must which should be just about the same as mine. Seeds are a little bit greener than I would have liked but are mostly brown and have that nice grape-nuts flavor to them that I like to see. I feel like they were ready to be picked, couldn't really have asked for anything better aside from a little browner stems and seeds but the tastes are there and the numbers seem to add up. I'll update tomorrow with the numbers, I'll be inoculating tomorrow as well.


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## zadvocate (Sep 19, 2016)

We went a good amount of vineyards but not enough if you ask me. my favorites were phelps, Littorai, and Hartford. I have. It started a topic, I might do that. I pick up my grapes on Friday and I'm excited and nervous. First time using grapes.


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## Luse_Cellar (Sep 19, 2016)

zadvocate said:


> We went a good amount of vineyards but not enough if you ask me. my favorites were phelps, Littorai, and Hartford. I have. It started a topic, I might do that. I pick up my grapes on Friday and I'm excited and nervous. First time using grapes.



I can't say I've tried any of these wines except I may have tried a Phelps at one point, can't seem to remember. Well as long as you keep an eye on it, and try to notice any faults before they take off I wouldn't be too worried!

Today was a busy day with the wine, got the measurements for the fruit: pH was 3.75, TA was 5.6, and sugars were 25.3 Brix. I opened the fermenter (trash can) and started hand-destemming the first layer or so of clusters with the help of my girlfriend. I then hand-crushed the whole must up a fair bit trying not to break any stems or crush any seeds. Today was quite warm- 105* F and as such my "cold soak" didn't stay too cool, the must was about 80* by the time I got home from school. I could tell there was a bit of CO2 in the must and it smelled and tasted like it had started to ferment just the slightest amount, but I didn't pick up on any off-flavors or aromas and definitely don't smell any VA so I'm actually pretty happy with that. I've always wanted to try a sequential fermentation and I guess I did just that here by accident. Everything is tasting and smelling really good, and the color is already impressive considering how early on it is. 

I adjusted the sugar to a calculated 24.8* Brix with water that I added a calculated amount of tartaric to so that the acid wouldn't be diluted as well. I also calculated an addition of tartaric to bring the pH down to 3.65, but I don't have a pH meter yet so I'm not sure where it's actually at. I also added 100ppm of DAP to try and avoid nitrogen deficiency, but if I start smelling any amount of sulfides I will either add more DAP or add some Fermaid-K. I then dissolved a normal dose of Go-Ferm in 110* water, and let it cool before adding that to the must. After mixing things up and crushing some more berries by hand, I then re-hydrated the RP-15 yeast per Lallemand's protocol and pitched that to the must. Again, I mixed things up by hand and took a hydrometer reading. After temperature compensation, it's at 1.101 Sp. Gravity, or about 24* Brix. I wish I had taken a reading with the hydrometer before I did the water addition, but I'm assuming the ~1* brix discrepancy between my calculated values and the actual result come from the small amount of wild fermentation that happened. It could also have been a bad sample or maybe I added too much water. My only regret is that I didn't add more fruit to the fermenter when we picked, as the top of the fruit is significantly lower than it was before and I could have made more wine, but oh well! I'm feeling pretty good about it on the whole, and I hope it continues to taste as good as it does.


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## Luse_Cellar (Sep 19, 2016)

Took these pictures two hours after pitching the yeast, they are very happy. It was really hot today so they had a head start, but they seem to be thriving. Hopefully it stays that way! I'm really impressed with the smell of this must, I'm thinking this is shaping up to be a great wine.


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## Steve_M (Sep 20, 2016)

zadvocate said:


> Making my first wine from real grapes this year and starting with a cab and a Zin/PS field blend.


Interesting, I too have a field blend of 70% PS 30% OVZ. Day three in primary, the color is blowing me away compared to the 50% Merlot, 30% Cab S. and 20% Cab Franc!


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## zadvocate (Sep 20, 2016)

Looking good! Luse. 

My field blend was going to be 90% Zinfandel and 10% PS But since I was buying three lugs of Zinfandel and had to buy one lug of PS just made it 7525. I will get it all started this weekend.


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## Luse_Cellar (Sep 21, 2016)

zadvocate said:


> Looking good! Luse.
> 
> My field blend was going to be 90% Zinfandel and 10% PS But since I was buying three lugs of Zinfandel and had to buy one lug of PS just made it 7525. I will get it all started this weekend.



Thank you! 

That sounds like fun, I bet it will be great.

Going into making this wine I was anticipating low fermentation temps and a slow fermentation with minimal extraction as a result. Temps have been sitting around 80 F and I'm already down to 17.5 Brix (1.072 Sp. Gr), was at 22 (1.091) this morning. I was anticipating adding some DAP or Fermaid-K at around 17 as they reccomend adding 1/3 way through fermentation but I think I'm gonna hold off until tomorrow afternoon and will probably do a small dose. There seems to be plenty of extraction, with great color, and the flavors are starting to develop quite a bit. Don't have a hint of sulfides but I wouldn't expect to yet anyways. Hoping it will start to slow down a bit soon, don't want a super fast fermentation.


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## Luse_Cellar (Sep 23, 2016)

These yeast are going nuts, it's been 3 days and already the hydrometer is showing 1.021 Sp. Gra. or about 5.5* Brix. I'm assuming that they're going to slow down in the next day or so (otherwise the Syrah would end up being dry the day after tomorrow) but they haven't shown any signs of slowing up at this point. Temperature has stayed around 80* F the whole time, and there seems to be plenty of extraction. Also, the flavors have developed really well, but I can't seem to think that it would be better in the long term for the ferment to take longer. However, I don't know how accurate this really is, perhaps there's more to it than just fermentation time overall. 

At any rate, it's developed some very nice flavors and it already has a really great long finish to it so I think maybe the fast fermentation has been OK. I'm pretty sure that I added too much yeast and mis-read the doseage rate, but only by a few grams so I'm not sure how much that would really affect things. Temperature hasn't gotten much over 80* so I guess these yeast may have more nutrients than I calculated. At any rate, I'm interested to see where things go from here. It already has a rather deep color, maybe not quite the inky black that many describe with Syrah but darker than a moderately colored Pinot. I've been continually removing some stems from the must once a day or so, trying to focus my attention more on the green stems than the brown. It has great mouthfeel from what I can gather from the very lees-ey and bubbly tastes I've gotten. I'm really excited to see how it looks and tastes after pressing and then after the first racking. Today was the first day I gave it a really big taste and I'm really impressed honestly. I did get some very finely managed fruit of very high quality, grown by an experienced winemaker (my dad) specifically to make great wine, but at least I haven't messed them up! At any rate, here's a cloudy glass I enjoyed today:


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## Boatboy24 (Sep 23, 2016)

Your color looks pretty good. I wouldn't worry about it - there are a lot of solids in there that make it look lighter. After you press and the gross lees settle, you'll be surprised at how dark it'll get after just a day or two.


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## JohnT (Sep 23, 2016)

You seem to be at "the top of the bell curve". 

I do a hot fermentation and activity usually tops up between days 3 and 4.


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## Luse_Cellar (Sep 24, 2016)

Boatboy24 said:


> Your color looks pretty good. I wouldn't worry about it - there are a lot of solids in there that make it look lighter. After you press and the gross lees settle, you'll be surprised at how dark it'll get after just a day or two.



I'm not worried about it, I'm impressed by it! I'm really looking forward to seeing how it looks after the first racking, I think that will be really telling. 



JohnT said:


> You seem to be at "the top of the bell curve".
> 
> I do a hot fermentation and activity usually tops up between days 3 and 4.



I'd say so, I'm down to about 2 Brix today, so getting down there. What kind of temperatures do you consider hot, and what kind of yeast and nutrients are you using? I feel as if 80*F isn't that crazy hot for a red wine ferment, and RP-15 isn't a super fast fermenter. I can't figure out why it went so fast, but I'm suspecting that there is or was too much nutrients in one form or another. I guess I'll have to see where things go from here. I haven't noticed any off-flavors, aside from lees but that's to be expected. 

I had a bit of a major turning point today: I have a re-cooped medium toast french barrel, which has been used for one vintage, that I was planning on using with this wine. I wasn't sure what the volume of it was, and it didn't say anywhere on the barrel so today I set out to determine the volume. Turns out it's a 20 gallon barrel, but I should only have 11 gallons or so of Syrah. So, after weighing my options, I'm going to pick some Grenache sometime soon after the Syrah is done with primary and out of the fermenter, and ferment it on it's own while I start the Syrah on ML. Then, I will start the Grenache on ML and blend them together into the barrel and have some extra breakdown to top with later on. This means I still get to barrel age the wine, and actually I think it will end up being a style of wine that I'm more interested in than the stand-alone Syrah anyways. I'm happy about this too because I was starting to get sad that this harvest was pretty much over for me.


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## Luse_Cellar (Sep 25, 2016)

This morning's punchdown found that we're down to -0.5 Brix, and temperatures are slowly declining. Taste-wise the wine has suddenly become quite noticeably tannic, but I think the tannin will become less harsh as the wine ages in barrel a bit, not to mention gets racked off the gross lees. I'm going to be pressing it off pretty soon here, in the next couple days depending on how fermentation keeps moving from here on out. It's interesting pulling stems out of must because they become so darkly colored from the wine, but it's difficult trying to pull berries off of the stems. It's really time consuming to do as well. I think I may try and have the grenache I get de-stemmed, we'll see.


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## berrycrush (Sep 26, 2016)

I was a little concerned about the 35ppm SO2 you started on the grapes, but I see your fermentation has been rolling along pretty well. Keep posting.


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## Luse_Cellar (Sep 26, 2016)

berrycrush said:


> I was a little concerned about the 35ppm SO2 you started on the grapes, but I see your fermentation has been rolling along pretty well. Keep posting.



Does that seem like too little to you? I was advised to go with 35ppm by a very experienced commercial winemaker so that's what I went with. I do believe that natural yeast metabolized about 1* Brix worth of sugar at the very beginning, but it tastes and smells really really good so I'm actually happy that that happened. 

Earlier today I measured with a hydrometer and was at -1.1* Brix so I decided since I had the afternoon off I would press. Initially I was just going to hand press with some cheesecloth but after spending 20 minutes to get ~1/4 gallon done and fighting with clogged cheesecloth I decided to just go rent a press. Spent $30 and rented a #30 press, and 45 minutes later had 10 gallons of pressed off Syrah. With my girlfriend's help, it went really easy and I'm very happy with the results. I didn't press it super hard, there was still some moisture left in the pomace afterwards but I stopped pressing when the wine that was coming out of the press started to get really leesy. I was tasting the wine as it came out of the press to taste for harshness from too firm of pressing but didn't get too harsh by the time I stopped. Hydrometer reading after pressing was 0.9967 Sp. Gra., or about -0.88* Brix, so only about 0.22* Brix were released. Now I'm gearing up to pick Grenache and get that through primary so I can get the Syrah and the Grenache into the barrel. 

Here's some pictures from today:


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## Luse_Cellar (Sep 28, 2016)

Went ahead and did the first racking today, as I feel that fermentation is very close to being done. Temperature is down to 70.5* F and with correction, Specific Gravity is 0.9956 or about -1.15* Brix. I was starting to pick up on a bit of a reductive quality in the aromas of the wine so I decided to do a splash racking, hoping to get some more oxygen in there. It's amazing how much better it looks, smells, and tastes after the first racking, it's really turning into a nice wine. Definitely needs some more body to it, and some of the harshness of the malic acid cut down so I'm excited to see how it is after ML. At any rate, I snapped a quick picture of how it's looking in glass now. Definitely still a little cloudy, and I have to say I'm not very good at racking on the small scale. I'm used to racking with a 2" hose in a 5,000 gallon tank which is somehow easier for me haha. The lees wasn't super compact, so I collected 1.5 liters off the top of the lees to see if I can settle that out some more, which may not be worth it but we'll see. Anyways, here's how we're looking now:




I'll be picking another 13 gallons worth of Grenache from the same vineyard on Saturday morning. I hear that Grenache has very pink lees generally, I'm excited to see what that's like.


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## Luse_Cellar (Oct 2, 2016)

Picked Grenache early Saturday morning. Had planned on having it de-stemmed early that afternoon but that didn't happen. Threw some KMBS, oak chips, and dry ice in there Saturday afternoon and will be inoculating with RP15 tomorrow afternoon. I'm thinking I will do much more de-stemming by hand initially than I did with the Syrah. I'm hoping to make this a little more fruit forward and a little brighter than the Syrah, which should make a nice blend. Unfortunately, I didn't get as much as I had wanted to get (about 13 gallons worth) so I'm going to have to top my barrel with something else when it comes time for that. At any rate, this Grenache tastes amazing and the fruit I got came from a block that grows tiny berries so I'm hoping this will be some great stuff. I don't have any numbers on it yet but will soon. (the white berries are ones that are frozen from dry ice, not a mold/mildew)


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## zadvocate (Oct 4, 2016)

Those look great. That's great that you can go and pick fruit like that.


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## Luse_Cellar (Oct 5, 2016)

zadvocate said:


> Those look great. That's great that you can go and pick fruit like that.



Thank you, I'm pretty excited to make this stuff because it's so good as fruit and I really love Rhone reds. I agree, it's really nice that my dad has his own vineyard and that he's interested in helping me learn about this stuff. He also really does know what he's doing so it's very high quality fruit.

I tested the must yesterday and this stuff was at 32 Brix. Before pitching the yeast, adding some Go-Ferm, and DAP, I ended up adding a bunch of acidulated water (like 1/5 of the original volume worth). I'm a little worried that I may have added too much but I guess that will remain to be seen. Today the must is down to 21 Brix but there are a number of raisins in there and many of the berries are still whole so I think some more sugar will be released in the next couple days. It has already started to get some nice color and flavor so I'm not super concerned but it just seems like a lot of water to me. Two different online calculators confirm the amount I added so I guess we'll see. I also have to keep in mind that these berries were very small on average so there should be a good amount of skin contact. I also spent a fair amount of time de-stemming as many of the clusters as I felt like I could in the time I had, and will do the same tomorrow and continually throughout fermentation. I don't really want as many of the stems in this must as I had with the Syrah because they are much greener and are likely quite harsh. Also Grenache is lighter than Syrah so I'm not sure it can handle the harshness too well. The winery I used to work at follow somewhat of a burgundian model so we made a ton of Chardonnay and a fair amount of Pinot along with some custom crush clients. The smell of this Grenache as juice is almost identical to the smell of Pinot juice, which is really nice to me. We'll see how that changes.

I also just inoculated the Syrah for ML. I had to eyeball the amount of culture I added because it was graciously given to me in a very small quantity of freeze-dried culture which I can not accurately weigh (enough ML to inoculate 20 gallons is almost nothing to a commercial facility). I also added Acti-ML at the normal dosage, and just put the dry powder along with dry culture into the container. I'm not sure if many people are comfortable with doing this, but this is how we did it at the winery I worked at and I trust the winemaker there greatly. Also, they never seem to have any problems getting anything to go through ML and they make 30,000 cases/year so my ~8 cases should be fine.


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## smorg (Oct 5, 2016)

Thanks for sharing! Makes my mouth water!

Question though, how did you turn 140# of grapes into 10 gallons?

I only got 14 gallons out of my 252 pounds of grapes. I am a bit jealous!


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## Luse_Cellar (Oct 5, 2016)

smorg said:


> Thanks for sharing! Makes my mouth water!
> 
> Question though, how did you turn 140# of grapes into 10 gallons?
> 
> I only got 14 gallons out of my 252 pounds of grapes. I am a bit jealous!



Ha well that's a good sign!

That's a good question and the answer lies in how my measurements are taken. Bathroom scales are quite inaccurate and to add to it I don't have a great way of taking measurements of volume in that scale. I also round up or down a fair amount when I write on here but the truth is that according to the tick marks on the plastic containers I have, there's about 9-9.5 gallons of Syrah. To some extent this leads to inaccurate additions and what not, but this is more for fun anyways.


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## Luse_Cellar (Oct 6, 2016)

This morning I added another 50g of oak chips (medium toasted french) from a gut feeling more than anything. I punched down 5 times today to try and get more sugar released and to try and integrate the water addition more because it was tasting very strongly of tartaric acid last night. Last I checked, sugars were up to 24 Brix and the flavor, aroma, and color has started to really shine through much more than before. I just went out and did the last punchdown for the day and it was foaming along nicely. Ambient temperatures have dropped significantly from when the Syrah was going through primary, so the must is only at about 70* F currently. I did put the fermenter out in the sun with the top on for an hour or two to encourage some heat, that seemed to help but only raised the temps by 2 degrees. I also mixed up the Syrah again and put it in the sun for about an hour to try and encourage the MLF. Haven't really heard or seen any CO2, but then again I'm not using an airlock so I guess maybe I wouldn't be able to notice yet anyways. I'm a little concerned that maybe ML is going to be tricky but it's too soon to tell. I wish I had more testing abilities so that I could really know what was going on but again, this is mostly for fun for me anyways. 

Here's a couple pictures from tonight's punchdown.


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## smorg (Oct 6, 2016)

Is... Is it... Is it wrong that I want to lick your hand? Looks yummy!

I usually avoid putting my hands (or other body parts) in my wine, am I paranoid?


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## Luse_Cellar (Oct 6, 2016)

smorg said:


> Is... Is it... Is it wrong that I want to lick your hand? Looks yummy!
> 
> I usually avoid putting my hands (or other body parts) in my wine, am I paranoid?



Haha I think maybe you're onto a new tasting room model, tasting straight from the winemaker's hand! I'm glad to have the positive feedback 

The only thing to keep in mind is that fermenting must is very high in both yeast cell counts and nutrients, so don't go itching your eye or any... sensitive areas... or you may end up with a pretty gnarly yeast infection. It also means that I have little micro-wineries under my fingernails at any given time. It's obviously not the most sanitary thing but basically it's easier for me to clean my hands after a punchdown than a punchdown tool itself and this lends to a more careful punchdown anyways. I want to avoid breaking stems up as much as possible, so this seems like the best way to go about that. 

There's legend of a winery somewhere in France that would invite people to swim (naked) in their must before inoculating to help mix things together. I just make sure to wash my hands well before and after, and I think it's fine. There's a somewhat locally famous cheesemaker who makes some very nice goat cheese with a distinct flavor that they figured out came from the microbes that naturally lived in her armpits which inevitably made it's way into the cheese. I can't remember the cheese company and I'm not sure I've tried the cheese but the general consensus was that it was very good cheese. I'm not sure if I'm lucky enough to have desirable micro-flora in my armpits but my Syrah turned out really good and I only did hand punch-downs with that so I think it'll be ok. Using a stainless steel or otherwise sanitary punchdown tool is more controlled without a doubt, however.


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## Luse_Cellar (Oct 9, 2016)

I've been noticing this really strong and interesting aroma of green Jolly Ranchers coming from the Grenache. I'm wondering if it will remain in the wine or if this is only going to be there for primary fermentation. I'm not sure I mind either way, but I have a feeling that it will go away. Anyways, down to about 6 Brix now. This one isn't going as quickly as the Syrah but is still moving along pretty quickly. I keep breaking open more and more berries but it doesn't seem to be affecting the sugar levels dramatically. At any rate, the color and flavor is really starting to become impressive. It's still tasting very sweet and young but it's starting to have more and more finish to it. It's very fruity and sweet on the front and then dies off in the middle then comes back with a bit of a finish. I think it will definitely develop more but the blend with the Syrah should be very nice.


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## Luse_Cellar (Oct 15, 2016)

Well, today was good and bad. I pressed off the Grenache, which so far is doing very well and actually improved with pressing. I ended up pressing the pomace twice because the press I rented was kinda wimpy and left the pomace still fairly moist. There were also many whole berries left behind and seeing as how I added so much water to the must early on, I wanted to get out as much flavor as I could with pressing. Overall, I'm quite impressed with the Grenache. As a standalone wine I think it's a little lacking in tannin and falls short in the mid-palette but the Syrah is full of mid-palette and has plenty of tannin to pass around so they should blend well together. I expected them to be a good match based off of the success of the typical Rhone blend. I think there's a reason this is a common blend. I ended up with just over 12 gallons of Grenache, so clearly the bathroom scale is inaccurate and my intuition was more accurate. At any rate, pressing off gave me another 0.5 brix to ferment, and that seems to be going nicely with lots of CO2 still being released. Unfortunately, I won't be able to inoculate for ML until a week from now but I think that'll be ok. 

I also wasn't able to check on my Syrah for a week and unfortunately it now has a noticeable aroma of rotten eggs... I'm pretty bummed about it because it was doing so well but I'll splash rack it tomorrow morning and see if that works to get rid of the stink. I'm thinking that I'm probably just gonna go ahead and hit it with some copper sulfate anyways for fear or mercaptan or worse down the line. I'll see how it smells after racking off the lees, as it's possible that the H2S is mostly coming from the lees. I'm not sure how this happened as I had thought it was pretty much done with fermentation. I didn't add any nutrients after 1/3 of the way through because it went so quickly (and that was only a 75% dose of Fermaid-K) but maybe I should have. I'll know more in the morning but I'm certainly not happy about it. I also plan on racking the Grenache off tomorrow (off of it's gross lees) but probably won't do a splash racking with that because Grenache apparently doesn't like much oxygen exposure. I was going to put them together in my barrel tomorrow but I don't think that's going to happen until next weekend at this stage because I only plan on treating the Syrah with copper, and I don't want to strip any of the (amazing) flavor out of the Grenache with the copper. Anyways I'm pretty frustrated with the H2S (even though I sorta expected it with Syrah) but I'm also really impressed with the Grenache. Before pressing it was a little too tart and tasted a little too wimpy. Now it tastes a fair bit less tart and has a little more body to it. Of course, this could be a consequence of more sugar being released to solution but I'd like to think that the whole berries that still existed contributed some interesting flavors. At any rate, I'm just hoping my sulfide problem with the Syrah doesn't pose me any considerable problems, but I guess we'll see.


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## stickman (Oct 15, 2016)

I have made quite a bit of red wine from Sonoma including the Carneros region. The young wine (if grapes are not over ripe) can be tannic with a high capacity to take oxygen, and with lees present, the wine quickly gets reductive generating H2S. The first two weeks after press are critical and excess lees should be removed quickly. I generally do two rackings before ML to remove as much of the gross lees as possible, one at 24hrs after press and another at 72hrs after press. The ML culture and oak are added after the second racking; in this type of wine, I think the oak addition timing is critical, the oak contains oxygen which is released to the wine slowly, similar to micro oxygenation, which helps to minimize H2S production. 
Rack off the lees asap, if you have inert gas, you can sparge the H2S out without oxidizing the H2S or the wine, transfer to barrel or add oak asap.


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## Luse_Cellar (Oct 16, 2016)

stickman said:


> I have made quite a bit of red wine from Sonoma including the Carneros region. The young wine (if grapes are not over ripe) can be tannic with a high capacity to take oxygen, and with lees present, the wine quickly gets reductive generating H2S. The first two weeks after press are critical and excess lees should be removed quickly. I generally do two rackings before ML to remove as much of the gross lees as possible, one at 24hrs after press and another at 72hrs after press. The ML culture and oak are added after the second racking; in this type of wine, I think the oak addition timing is critical, the oak contains oxygen which is released to the wine slowly, similar to micro oxygenation, which helps to minimize H2S production.
> Rack off the lees asap, if you have inert gas, you can sparge the H2S out without oxidizing the H2S or the wine, transfer to barrel or add oak asap.



This really does make sense and I hadn't really considered this. I guess I figured I would wait to rack it off the second time until I was going to add the Syrah and the Grenache to the barrel. I knew deep down that I really should have gotten it off that lees sooner and gotten some more oxygen exposure. Oh well, the H2S isn't the worst I've smelled. When I was a cellar rat there was a Merlot that I did a copper addition to that was really really bad but after adding the copper it came back just fine. I like the idea of oak addition, I may give that a shot this coming week. I still have some chips left and I think if I leave just the Syrah on chips for a week or two that may actually be a good thing in the long run. Thank you for your insight, I really appreciate it! 

I racked the Syrah off today, gave it a healthy dose of oxygen, and gave it a whiff. Surprisingly enough, it didn't seem to change at all, and the lees also didn't really reek of H2S as I had thought it would. I'm going to do a copper trial and addition on Monday (and probably oak chips too now). I think it's better that I hit it with copper now rather than trying to blow it off when it could turn to mercaptan later, especially since it isn't a terrible smell of H2S and it doesn't seem to be getting any worse. I added some Grenache to the Syrah to fill the containers better (also to have a place to put a couple gallons of the Grenache). I also racked the Grenache off it's gross lees (which was a crazy pink color) and due to running out of containers wound up just putting it into my barrel (meaning the barrel is about half full of Grenache right now). I sorta feel like this is a bad idea but also considering what happened with the Syrah I think this may be not such a bad idea. It will only be in the barrel half full for about a week before I add the Syrah to the barrel. I'll go ahead and rack it again sometime this coming week as well, then inoculate with ML. I think I'm actually going to rehydrate the bacteria this time to compare how that works compared to just putting the dry bacteria in the Syrah. I think the Syrah is going because when I was racking it it was foaming up a fair bit but normally I can't tell at all. I'll have to test it soon. The Grenache and Syrah will end up going through ML together anyways, so I'm sure it'll work out in the end. 

Has anyone aged on yeast hulls before? I've been reading up on it a fair bit and I'm thinking about trying it, at least during ML, but I'm not sure if I'm missing something. My thought is that if I add the yeast hulls this coming week and leave the wine on them until ML is done or at least until my next racking, it would help with ML and may also give the wine more body and complexity. Obviously I don't want to add more nutrients than I need but it seems like yeast hulls are a little more inert than most other nutrient sources. I have read that they can oxidize and release rancid flavors, which would obviously be something I'd like to avoid. Thought I'd see if anyone on here has any experience with the hulls for this purpose, and any ideas on whether or not they're worth using. I can't seem to find a whole lot of info on uses of yeast hulls other than restarting a stuck ferment.


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## Luse_Cellar (Oct 17, 2016)

Got myself some 1% copper sulfate today. Started off by making a 50mL solution of 0.01% copper sulfate and used that to make 4 different concentrations of copper in the Syrah: 0.2ppm, 0.3ppm, 0.4ppm, and 0.5ppm, as well as a control. Most things I read recommended larger doses to compare but I knew that my H2S problem wasn't too out of control and was also in it's fairly early stages so I decided to go the route I did. I mixed them up and let them sit for a few minutes before giving each one a smell and comparing it to the control. I spent about an hour doing so, referring back to the original container of wine which obviously had the strongest smell of H2S, and really trying to hone in. It's a very subtle thing for sure and takes lots of second guessing and referring back to the control and other concentrations to decide on a number. In the end, I decided on 0.4ppm. It had the "fruitiest" smell, didn't have any perceptible H2S and seemed logical to boot. I measured out the 1% copper solution using a 10mL syringe and a 1mL syringe to get the most accurate reading I could do on the cheap. That ended up being 3.3mL per container, each of them having about 5.5 gallons of wine in them. My process was admittedly pretty far from accurate. I'm used to chemistry labs where I have access to all sorts of super accurate measuring devices so it felt pretty far from accurate to me the whole time. That being said, it was at least precise enough that I was able to notice a distinct difference between each trial, pretty amazing considering I was looking at a difference of 0.01ppm. Anyways, my other option was what was written on the bottle "add 0.5ppm to the wine and yeast hulls to capture the excess copper. Then, re-smell and add more if necessary." Or I could have guessed, but I decided that even a fairly inaccurate trial would be better than nothing. The trial would have been more accurate if I had used distilled water to make the diluted solution, had better measuring devices, and was using good wine glasses to smell the trials after letting them sit overnight in a stoppered container beforehand. I would have preferred to have done it this way with a few other people who were well honed in on smelling H2S, but this was the best I could do today. At any rate, copper is now in and I mixed it up well. I'll rack it off it's lees in a few days when I rack the Grenache again. Then, the Grenache and Syrah will finally be together in the barrel. Some places were recommending fining with bentonite after the copper addition, which I'll likely end up doing before I bottle the wine. Do any of you have experience with copper additions? I'm tempted to add some yeast hulls soon just to make sure I pull out as much copper as I can, and also to help MLF (which has kicked into gear a bit more recently) but not sure if I should for fear of adding excess nutrients for other bacteria to take over. Any advice?


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## Luse_Cellar (Oct 19, 2016)

This is where it starts to get a little nerdy but I'm betting a few people here are interested in this. I just spent a little time on excel making a quick ferm curve for the Syrah and the Grenache. This is showing Days of Fermentation vs Brix and Temperature (in Celsius). I made a trendline for the hell of it as well. 



Here you can see how quickly and steadily this ferment went. As you can see it only took 9 days and aside from that odd blip between days 2 and 3 it really goes very steadily. I'm not sure what caused that blip but I would imagine it may have been more sugar being released from the must, or perhaps a lag phase in the yeast. It seems to end right around when I added the first (and only) dose of Fermaid-K, which I did at 17 Brix. It could be due to all 3 possibilities. Day 7 was press day, which is why the sugar level increases abruptly. 



The much slower fermentation of the Grenache could in large part be due to the colder temperatures, or this could be a consequence of the slower fermentation. The increase of sugar level at day 2 is due to more berries being broken open after the water addition, not from a sugar or concentrate addition. I don't have an explanation for the blip at day 6, maybe some more sugar was released. I did do some de-stemming that day and also hand squeezed some whole berries before I took the reading so that's probably what caused it. It's really interesting to me how the tail end of the sugar depletion follows the temperature almost exactly in terms of it's slope. Day 11 was press day in this case.


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## stickman (Oct 19, 2016)

Looks good, in the Syrah data, you might want to change the second day 2 and second day 7 to 2.5 and 7.5, assuming the second data points were later in the day; this might correct the graph.


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## Luse_Cellar (Oct 20, 2016)

stickman said:


> Looks good, in the Syrah data, you might want to change the second day 2 and second day 7 to 2.5 and 7.5, assuming the second data points were later in the day; this might correct the graph.



This isn't a bad idea. I think if I wanted to get more detailed with it I would just go by hours after inoculation but like I said, I'm not taking this wine too seriously.


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## Luse_Cellar (Oct 26, 2016)

So after blending and tasting, it's still quite tart and fruity but once you get past the tartness it has wonderful body and finish. The aroma is quite pronounced as well, the green jolly rancher aroma really shines through, along with raspberry and strawberry. The color is a rather interesting dark purple with pink around the outside. I think it really needs ML to cut down on the tartness and round it out further, and I'm hoping the oxidation and concentration of the barrel will help as well. Because the barrel I am using is neutral, I will probably also pick up some oak cubes and put them in the barrel to further round out the tartness. ML wasn't seeming to have been going for the first 5 or so days, but finally over the last few days I can hear it going when I stick my ear in the bunghole. I haven't tasted it in a couple days but the aroma seems to be a bit less tart. I'm excited to see where it'll be when MLF is complete.


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## Boatboy24 (Oct 26, 2016)

Luse_Cellar said:


> The color is a rather interesting dark purple with pink around the outside.



If I'm not mistaken, that is a sign of a young wine. Thought I'd read somewhere that as they age out, the color is more consistent from center of glass to the outside.


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## Luse_Cellar (Oct 26, 2016)

Boatboy24 said:


> If I'm not mistaken, that is a sign of a young wine. Thought I'd read somewhere that as they age out, the color is more consistent from center of glass to the outside.



Interesting, I've not heard this before but I also don't see why not. However, the Syrah on it's own was very dark purple, and the Grenache on it's own was a much lighter pink/red. Both of them were consistent in color on their own. My inclination is that the color is as it is because of the blend. I'm surely quite interested in what will happen to the color as it ages.


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