Now it’s finally time to add sulfite and French oak chips and let this wine hang out for a few months.  I’ll check in on it in 2012!

Malic acid quick test results, batch #2 on the left and batch #1 on the right

It’s almost 6 weeks after initiating malolactic fermentation on our 2011 Fallbrook Syrah. I tested malic acid levels today with the Accuvin quick tests. Batch #1 (fermented with ICV-D80) is the one batch that didn’t seem to be progressing at all, but today it seems to be below the max value on the scale. When the readings are in the middle it’s sometimes difficult to tell exactly what the value is, but I think it’s around 110-150 mg/L. The remaining 3 batches are definitely done, no malic acid detectable! I’ll give batch #1 two more weeks of stirring then test again, it should be close enough to done to add sulfite. The rest are getting their sulfite today, and the group will decide what oaks, if any, to put in each batch. I’ve been very happy with 100% medium toast French oak, but trying something different is always fun.

Then I moved on to the 2010 vintage of Live Oak Vineyard Syrah.  I got out my handy-dandy (yes I love this thing!) Vinmetrica SC-100 sulfite analyzer, and in less than 2 minutes knew there is basically NO free SO2 in the barrel.  Yikes!  Doing a quick calculation from The Winemaker’s Answer Book, I estimated I should add about 7.5 grams of Kmeta, which is about 1 1/2 teaspoons.  After stirring this in, I need to take a little volume out of the barrel so I can put in a pound of medium toast Hungarian oak cubes.  The 5-gallon carboy was partially full, but since I didn’t want to deal with this on Monday I added marbles to the Better Bottle to top it up into the neck to minimize air exposure.  Which means now I need to get the marbles out so I can put the extra wine from the barrel in.  Since my hand won’t reach down the neck of the carboy, I racked the wine out, dumped out the marbles, then pulled the wine from the barrel and added this back to the carboy.  Yes, a bit of probably needless wine shuffling, but it happens.  At least I did think to dump in about 2 ounces of medium toast French oak chips into the 6-gallon carboy as I was filling it.  Now we’ll let that oak hang out for a few months and hopefully the syrah will come around the way we want it!

Thinking about the disaster involved with using my new must pump with the cleared primitivo in 2009, plus having lots of little batches, we opted to use the Buon Vino minijet filter pump, and bypass the filter unit to use it just as a pump.  It’s definitely slower than the must pump, but for these sized batches, that was kind of a good thing.

Since you never know exactly how much you’re going to get, we pumped everything to 6-gallon carboys first, then juggled them around into carboys that fit the volume as closely as possible.  We do want to top up the carboys to the necks now to minimize air contact, but want to leave just a little extra room so we can stir it up with a spoon every week during MLF.

After a few hours everything was ready to start MLF.  First I tested the free SO2 levels, just to be sure the yeast had not created too much during fermentation to inhibit MLB activity.  A quick run with the SC-100 showed levels were below 10 ppm.  So we then rehydrated VP41 MLB in one jar, and Opti-Malo Plus nutrients in another jar.  After 15 minutes, the appropriate amount of solution was added to each carboy, then stirred gently.

Overall we now have 9 gallons of batch #1, 6 gallons of free run and 5 gallons of press run for batch #2, 11 gallons of batch #3 (our favorite), and 9 gallons of batch #4.  Now it’s waiting time, we’ll stir the wine every week and in about 2 weeks we’ll test for the appearance of lactic acid.  Hopefully it will be positive, indicating that MLF is off and running!

I also stopped by the office winery today to check up on the barrels.  Dave added some sulfite last week, so I wanted to check the free SO2 levels.  He also commented that there isn’t much oak in the wines this year, so I wanted to check that out for myself and see if we needed to add some oak cubes to our barrels.  Indeed, both the merlot and petite sirah are loaded with big fruit-forward flavors this year, but there is really no oak detectable at all.  I went ahead and dumped in about 15 ounces of a mix of heavy and medium toast American oak cubes into each 30-gallon barrel.  We’ll need to check on these wines again in 8 weeks, that is the minimum time the wine should be exposed to this new oak. The free SO2 for both barrels is about 27 ppm, which is right on target — 25 to 35 ppm is a good range for free SO2 at this stage of winemaking.

So, I’m starting by racking off the merlot I already have at home.  It’s time to check the MLF, and happily it’s done!  I’ll add some sulfite and 3 ounces of heavy toast french oak cubes to the 6-gallon bottle., and a half ounce of oak and a pinch of sulfite to 2 one-gallon bottles.

When I went over to the office winery to pull of any recovered petite sirah from the pooled sludge, I was greeted by a swarm of fruit flies!  Needless to say, they had made a very happy home in our bucket o’ sludge, so I left it alone and will let Dave dump it out (he loves cleaning out the buckets!).  I grabbed the extra merlot and headed back home to add it to the rest, and also took a little of the petite sirah from the barrel that had been freshly inoculated with VP41 malolactic bacteria.  I’ll pour that into the syrah and hope *maybe* that will get the MLF going.  I’ll also put the bottles out in the garage to try to warm it up during the day.

After all of that wine shuffling, I still need to put the foils on the barolo and merlot that was bottled last weekend.  Happily, none of the corks seem to be leaking.  The Mosti Mondiale barolo kit came with corks and foils (as well as labels, but I made those myself), so I used those for finishing off the bottles.  It really sets those apart, plus then I will remember that this is the mega-expensive kit wine when I open them in a few years.  Hopefully it will be worth it!

With four different varietals in various stages of progress, as well as the last of the 2008 merlot to bottle, every weekend is going to be quite busy for a few more weeks.  Since I was out of malic acid tests last weekend when the primitivo was racked, sulfited, and oaked, I took a sample out to make sure it was done with MLF, and happily the results showed that malic acid was not detectable.  Then I moved on to test the syrah, which did not start MLF with the VP41, further proving how sensitive malolactic bacteria are.  Last weekend I inoculated the syrah with some fresh ELIOS MLB in addition to a sample of merlot undergoing active MLF, and it looks like that did the trick — the chromatograpy test shows about 40 mg/L lactic acid, positive for active MLF!

Next I needed to deal with the 2008 merlot, which I plan to bottle next weekend.  Since it did not successfully finish MLF last year, I treated it with lysozyme to make sure there were not little bugs hangin’ around to start fermenting in the bottle some time in the future.  I also added another dose of K-meta to make sure it was properly sulfited for long-term aging.

Once all that was done, it was time to head over to the office winery to check on the 2009 merlot MLF and press out the petite sirah.  The lactic acid test on the merlot did show that MLF was also progressing, hooray!  The PS was at about 0.5 degrees brix, so fermentation was not complete, but close enough — we needed to do this on a weekend.  Dave will take care of racking off of the gross lees and start MLF during the week.  Finally, done for today!

I ran out of malic acid tests (oops), but since the MLF on the primitivo was almost done last weekend, I went ahead and assumed that it was ready to rack and sulfite.  Since I only had one spare carboy at this point, I had to rack out the wine then clean the better bottle before I could rack the next bottle.  That made it take a little longer than it should have, but when I was done I had 3 6-gallon carboys and a 3-gallon carboy nicely topped.  I added 3 ounces of medium toast oak cubes per 6 gallons, with 2 6-gallon bottles getting French oak and the remaining 6-gallon and 3-gallon getting American oak.  This should give me a nice balance of oak in the final blend.  At least the primitivo is ready to rest!

We got a REALLY big press, it holds 90 liters, and we could actually fill it with 2 whole cans of must before starting the press!

We got through all 9 trash cans and cleaned everything up in 4 hours, in spite of all the trash talk.  I covered all of the juice with plastic wrap and put a layer of CO2 over the top to help protect it until we pump it into the barrels and start MLF in a few days.

On the note of MLF, it’s the second week of MLF for the primitivo and syrah.  Since the syrah had not yet kicked off MLF last week, I tested for lactic acid formation again in that wine.  I then tested malic acid levels in the primitivo, since it had started converting malic acid to lactic acid last week.

Malic acid levels have dropped to about 160 mg/L in the primitivo, which is showing good MLF progression.  The syrah, however, still doesn’t show any detectable levels of lactic acid, so this one doesn’t seem to be moving.  We’ll be picking up fresh MLB and nutrient for the merlot when we go pick up our Petite Sirah this week, so we’ll get a little extra for the syrah.  Although it is the same packet of MLB I put into the primitivo, it was added about a week afterwards.  This bacteria is very sensitive and could have gone bad already, so hopefully a fresh dose will do the trick.  Either way, both wines look lovely!