This year’s winemaking project is to buy a ½ ton of pinot noir and turn half of it into white pinot noir with the rest going to red wine. My grapes came from a renowned vineyard in Mendocino Ridge – the only non-contiguous AVA in America. The region is geographically bounded by the Pacific ocean to the west and Anderson Valley to the east, but only vineyards above 1200ft are considered part of Mendocino Ridge AVA. Hence the nickname of this region is the ‘islands in the sky’, as the vineyard-bearing slopes rise out of the fog below on late summer/early fall days such as today. It’s ridiculously beautiful up there.
The vineyard manager called the pick for this morning, and I showed up a little after 9am when the picking crew were still out there bringing in my grapes (Pinot Noir 667 clone for those keeping score). Can’t get fresher than that! The thing in the middle of the grape rows in the picture above is the tractor bringing in my bin
. Fortunately it was a pleasantly cool morning after the hot days earlier this week. I loaded up my truck (with a very generously overloaded ½ ton bin) and headed home.
Back on the ‘crush pad’, Mrs Monkey and I set to work crushing and pressing out the white pinot juice. My crusher/destemmer is a bit aggressive for this task – ideally I’d like to keep the berries more intact, but it’s what I have and to be honest I won’t be too upset if my wine ends up having a slight blush to it. We went through 5 cycles of crush/press (plus the free run from a 6th press load) and ended up with about 27.5 gallons of juice. I added Lallzyme Cmax to aid juice clarification; it seems to be working well despite being 2 years old. I saved the pomace from 2 of the press runs and added it to my 2 red fermentation bins, to enrich the must with the goal of extracting a bit more color/tannin.
After breaking for lunch we crushed the rest of the grapes – a breeze since we didn’t have to press this time! Since we had such a generous ½ ton bin I set up a third primary fermenter. We ended up with 2x 44gal Brutes (I’m guessing about 35 gal must in each one), and a 32 gal Brute that was about half full. If I’d known we’d have so much I would have saved another press load of pomace to add to it, but hindsight is 20/20…
Both juice and red wine must had ~30ppm SO2 added – except for the ‘overflow’ bin, for which I plan to experiment with native yeast fermentation. I didn’t measure brix/temperature since I know it usually ‘soaks up’ overnight, but I will do this with my lab work tomorrow before pitching yeast.
The vineyard manager called the pick for this morning, and I showed up a little after 9am when the picking crew were still out there bringing in my grapes (Pinot Noir 667 clone for those keeping score). Can’t get fresher than that! The thing in the middle of the grape rows in the picture above is the tractor bringing in my bin
. Fortunately it was a pleasantly cool morning after the hot days earlier this week. I loaded up my truck (with a very generously overloaded ½ ton bin) and headed home.Back on the ‘crush pad’, Mrs Monkey and I set to work crushing and pressing out the white pinot juice. My crusher/destemmer is a bit aggressive for this task – ideally I’d like to keep the berries more intact, but it’s what I have and to be honest I won’t be too upset if my wine ends up having a slight blush to it. We went through 5 cycles of crush/press (plus the free run from a 6th press load) and ended up with about 27.5 gallons of juice. I added Lallzyme Cmax to aid juice clarification; it seems to be working well despite being 2 years old. I saved the pomace from 2 of the press runs and added it to my 2 red fermentation bins, to enrich the must with the goal of extracting a bit more color/tannin.
After breaking for lunch we crushed the rest of the grapes – a breeze since we didn’t have to press this time! Since we had such a generous ½ ton bin I set up a third primary fermenter. We ended up with 2x 44gal Brutes (I’m guessing about 35 gal must in each one), and a 32 gal Brute that was about half full. If I’d known we’d have so much I would have saved another press load of pomace to add to it, but hindsight is 20/20…
Both juice and red wine must had ~30ppm SO2 added – except for the ‘overflow’ bin, for which I plan to experiment with native yeast fermentation. I didn’t measure brix/temperature since I know it usually ‘soaks up’ overnight, but I will do this with my lab work tomorrow before pitching yeast.
