My pal Ray also submitted his 2009 Primitivo and won a Silver medal.  Paul entered the 2009 merlot and petite sirah that we recently bottled, and won a Gold medal for the petite sirah and Bronze medal for the merlot. Mike and Tricia Hoffman won several medals as well, Mike got a Gold medal for his sangiovese and a Silver for his primitivo (from a different source than mine and Ray’s), and Tricia won a Silver medal and Best of Class for an Amarone wine kit! Several other people won awards for wine kits at the fair, too. Congratulations to everyone!

Susanne Hunter won Silver medal and Best of Class with her Pinot Grigio wine kit

Beth Roseman and Gesa Cowell (not shown) won Gold medals for their Riesling wine kits

Tricia won a Silver Medal and Best of Class for her Amarone wine kit

One thing I forgot was how much preparation it takes before the actual bottling process.  I do my winemaking in the kitchen, which means cleaning up the surfaces before starting anything.  That’s one benefit to having a dedicated space for bottling, or making your wine at a home winemakers’ center like Curds and Wine, where the proprietor prepares everything and cleans up for you (a little shameless self-promotion).

I racked the 4 carboys together into a 30-gallon “primary fermentor,” AKA food-grade plastic trash can.  It then took about 20 minutes to fill all of the bottles, another 10 minutes to put on shrink capsules with a thermocapsuler, and 10 minutes to slap on labels and put the bottles into boxes.  The final count was 76 filled bottles and one partial bottle.  We had the partial bottle with dinner.  Although it is young and freshly bottled, it is showing great promise.  The wine was very clear, probably due to a year bulk aging.  Light aromas of black currant and blackberries with hint of black cherry.  Good oak, though definitely needs some time to settle in with the chewy, dusty flavors of dark ripe fruit and tea with smoky finish.  The wine is definitely quite closed right now, but hopefully in just a few months it will open up and be ready for late summer cookouts.

In my excitement to get the wine bottled, I completely forgot to test the free SO2 or add an extra dose of Kmeta before bottling.  I guess this will be a test wine to show how important proper SO2 levels are for aging — worse case, we’ll have to drink it all sooner than later!

Our 2010 Fallbrook syrah is hanging out in the flextank, which did pop out into a perfect sealed cylinder once the wine was pumped in.  Paul came by to get a pound of “house toast” French oak to toss in, we’ll taste it in a few months to see what we think.

He also brought a sample of wine for me to test free SO, so I checked that as well as the merlot and petite sirah in the barrels.  I used my new favorite toy, the SC-100 analyzer from Vinmetrica (which I happen to carry at Curds and Wine).  This instrument is so easy and fast, I love it!  It turned out everything needed a dose of metabisulfite, which didn’t really surprise me. The merlot and petite sirah also need more oak, Dave and Josh will visit soon to taste and discuss oak options.  I’m considering a mix of American and Hungarian oak, any suggestions are welcomed!

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 spice. The wine is very clear and a nice dark garnet in color. Very fruit-forward on the palate with good oak, fruit, and spice balance. This wine turned out to be our favorite for the night, too bad it’s the smallest lot of wine for 2009.

Next we sampled the primitivo from Amador county. I put both American and French oak in this wine but have kept them separate to see how they each impact the final product. We started with the French oak sample. The wine had great cherry fruit aromas and great color. Good acidity, very dry with good tannins and fruit. In comparison, the wine with American oak had more caramel flavors and was slightly sweeter tasting. Both were great, but my father-in-law said I should keep the American-oaked primitivo separate to bottle on its own. A quick 50/50 blend of the two oaks was also very nice, so it will be tough to decide how to divvy this wine up; I am also planning to make a Paraduxx-like blend with merlot and cabernet sauvignon.

We moved on to the merlot from Lambert Bridge vineyard in Sonoma county. It is a little different from the 2008 vintage, although that year the merlot did not finish MLF. The 2009 vintage has aromas of bell pepper with vanilla, and flavors of dark fruit with good spice. Big tannins and good acid in this wine as well. This sample was just from the “overflow” carboy, though, which got French oak added to it. The rest of that merlot is in our American oak barrel that needed extra oak added, so that might taste a little different.

Finally we tasted the petite sirah (again, just the “overflow” carboy). Aromas on this wine were faint, and a little “off”. The wine is a deep, inky black-purple in color, but very clear. Happily there were no weird off flavors, the wine has good tannins but not as much acid as I expected. It has a very green, young flavor, with bell pepper, black currant, and light spice. But, there’s plenty of time for the petite sirah and merlot to develop more, as we all decided at our last tasting to leave both of these in the barrels for another year.

Even though we only had 5 samples of wine, they were all very “big” and quite alcoholic.  So, we wound down the evening with a nice, refreshing parmesan flan with fresh home-grown heirloom tomatoes and basil on top.

The set up involves:

• pump — the air flow rate should be 1 L/min, most aquarium pumps are close enough to this;  basically you just need to be sure gas passing through the H2O2 solution has time to react to form H2SO4 proportional to free SO2 released
• closed sample container — I used a 125 mL erlenmyer flask with a 2-hole stopper in the top.  I poked a pipet through so that the side running directly to the pump would reach to the bottom of the flask, and the other side would then feed into the next part –
• receiving container — pretty much anything works here, it doesn’t need to be sealed, you just want to be able to bubble into this without it splashing out.  I used a 50 mL flask here, but a tube would have been fine.
• Several solutions, including an indicator solution, hydrogen peroxide (H2O2), phosphoric acid (H3PO4), and sodium hydroxide (NaOH).  Mine are new and haven’t been opened yet, but ideally you want to make fresh 0.3% H2O2 solution every time, or keep it cold immediately after using it. Also, the 0.01 N NaOH solution should be freshly diluted and titrate it with potassium acid phthalate to be the most accurate.

First, H2O2 is put into the last container, the receiving container.

A few drops of indicator solution is added to this, then a drop or two of NaOH is added until the solution is a bright green (depending on the indicator;  it might also be a bright blue or yellow).

Wine is put into the closed sample container, and then phosphoric acid is added to it.  The stopper with the 2 lines is inserted, so that one line attaches to the pump, and the other ends directly into the bottom of the H2O2 solution.  The pump is then turned on, and air is pushed through the system for 15 minutes.

The H2O2 receiving flask turned from bright green to bright purple pretty quickly.  As it bubbles through, it smells really nice — like a wine air freshener.  All of the wines smelled fine, no off-odors or signs of things going wrong; also no more signs of weird white top layers on anything (yay!).  I also checked the pH of all of the wines, since this affects the amount of free SO2 you ultimately want.

I checked both carboys of the syrah, and both had the same readings.  I also checked one carboy of the primitivo, as well as one carboy of each of the petite sirah and merlot that was residing in the shower.

The numbers are:

Syrah:  pH 3.5, free SO2 ~8 ppm;  low, but low enough to try to start MLF again.

Primitivo:  pH 3.68, free SO2 = 14.4 ppm.  That pH is a little high, but higher than last time I checked;  I’ll test it again after I rack it next time to see if it’s still too high.

Petite Sirah:  pH 3.76, free SO2 = 24 ppm.  That pH is really high, so we might need to do some adjustments.

Merlot:  pH 3.6, free SO2 = 13 ppm.

So, all of the wines have pretty low free SO2;  optimal range is 25 – 40 ppm, and varies with the pH.  They all need to be racked off of their lees again and tasted for oak, so I’ll probably add a bit of Kmeta then.  I also need to get samples from the barrels and test them, too.

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 in color.  I gave it a taste to try to decide if I should leave in the oak cubes or not.  The wine with American oak cubes was quite spicy and definitely had a strong oakiness, so I won’t transfer those cubes after racking.  The wine with French oak, however, had a much more subtle oak character, so those cubes will get added back to the racked wine.  Overall the primitivo has nice aromas of ripe fruits with good spice.  Rich, velvety flavors of cedar, spice box, blackberry and currant are developing nicely.  I’m so glad I got these grapes!

I also have a small bottle petite sirah sludge that I want to get off of the nasty lees.  When I went to pull off the cleared wine, I saw that it had thin layer of creepy white stuff on top.

It smells OK, like wine, nothing funky.  So, I dipped under the weird layer and pulled off the clear wine.  I got about 400 mLs off, then took a little sample to taste.

It’s pretty, nice and clear, deep dark garnet in color — and totally yucky.  It’s got aromas of acetone plus something sickly-sweet, and tasted equally as nasty.  Ick.  I sprinkled a little bit of Kmeta in, otherwise I’ll just leave this one separate to see if it gets over it, or feeds my vinegar cultures in the garage.

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!

This is what 1500 pounds of merlot looks like!

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 these yeasts, he said the grapes have a vegetal overtone this year.  These yeasts will bring out the fruity character more.  So, I had to go in to the server room winery to punch down 9 32-gallon trash cans!  It wasn’t fermenting too vigorously in the morning, but by evening it was sizzling away with happy yeasts.

It was also time to give the syrah and primitivo a stir and check for malolactic fermentation.  They both smelled great, the primitivo has rich aromas of spicy dark fruit, and the syrah has lovely violet, strawberry, and plum tones, very fruit forward.  I used quick tests to check for lactic acid, a sign that MLF is active.

It’s always difficult to read these tests, but since I had the 2 samples, it was clear that the primitivo is actively undergoing MLF, but the syrah has barely any detectable lactic acid.  The syrah is a slightly higher alcohol content, hopefully that is not inhibiting the MLF.  Since the primi is working, though, it’s not likely the bugs or the temperature.  I’ll check again next weekend and hope for the best!

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