My in-laws are visiting from Germany, and that seemed like a good reason to check the progress of all of the vintage 2009 wines in the shower. I pulled 100 mL samples from various carboys for a taste. We started with the Fallbrook syrah. This wine already has great aromas with big fruit and good [...]
Tag archive: primitivo
We are planning to bottle the syrah soon, and I will also probably bottle the primitivo as well. The merlot and petite sirah in the barrels have not picked up enough oak for our tastes, so we’re going to leave them for another year. I realized I haven’t cleaned out the airlocks on my carboys [...]
I’ve been meaning to set up a free SO2 aeration/oxidation (A/O) system for a while to test our wines. I’ve mentioned before that the “quick tests” are difficult to read (especially for red wines, since it relies on a color change in the purple range) and are notoriously inaccurate. From the information I could find, [...]
The primitivo has been settling out since October, so it seemed like time to poke at it. I like to splash rack my wine that is bulk aging in carboys at least once to try to give it a little oxygenation while it’s hanging out. The primi has become wonderfully clear already, a lovely purple-ruby [...]
Lots to do this weekend! Of course, there were 2 trips to the office winery to punch down the newly pitched Petite Sirah. By the evening, the temp was up to 78 degrees (in an air conditioned room) and there were serious caps on all of the buckets. Then I had to deal with trying [...]
All of our wines are fermenting fast this year, the merlot was already at 0 brix by Friday. Dave retested all the cans Saturday morning after we had all gathered for pressing, and noticed that the hydrometer he had used was broken — there was juice inside of the hydrometer. But, luckily the juice was [...]
Yep, harvest season is in full swing. Our merlot from Dry Creek Valley in Sonoma arrived Tuesday. The plan was to do a 4-5 day cold soak, then pitch the yeast on Sunday — except it started spontaneously fermenting on Friday! Paul ran out and got the yeasts to pitch, ICV-D21 and BM4x4. Chris recommended [...]
Paul pressed out the syrah this week, and then racked the juice off of the gross lees into carboys to start the MLF. It looks like we only got about 10 gallons of juice, and he also kept a bucket of “sludge” that looked like it might settle out and yield a little more volume. [...]
I checked on the primitivo this morning, and saw that the bottles had warped again. This happened before, the ongoing fermentation creates a negative pressure that causes the bottles to kind of “suck in” and get warped. It’s an easy fix, I just pulled off the bungs to release the pressure and they went back [...]
It was time to pump off the cleared wine into a clean trash can for inoculation of the MLB. My hubby was nice enough to help me, since wrangling the wine pump could get a little hairy; both hoses need to be held under the wine, while plugging in the pump and sucking air through [...]