Week two

We had originally planned on pressing the syrah, but the fermentation was going pretty slowly. With a starting brix of 25, we were just at 18 on Sunday. We certainly could have pressed; there seemed to be very good color extraction, but generally you want to wait until it brix has dropped by 1/3. So, we decided to postpone until Friday. The grenache, however was ready to press, the brix having dropped from 21 to 3...which is quite a drop. We also wanted to consolidate the Rielsing--it certainly seems like the carboys could be fuller without the fermentation overflowing. So we moved the Rielsing, which freed up a carboy for the grenache. Then we pressed the grenache, in a single pressing. Pressing after a week of fermentation gives a higher yield of wine, and the "pie" is much drier. The juice from the grenache was quite pale-looked like a raspberry smoothie. Also it probably had a good deal of malic acid as it seemed to have somewhat of a cidery taste.



We now had extra time, so we used it to bottle last year's 'Bordeaux' blend. This blend was 80% cabernet sauvignon, 15% merlot, and 5% cabernet franc. Here's some shots from last January 29, 2005 when we tasted for the blending. We were doing some serious drinking that day, not your frivolous type drinking.
We then put in our American oak barrel, which had been used the previous year for syrah. It stayed in the barrel until September 9th, when we moved to carboys in preparation for bottling.

After 4 weeks in the carboys, the blend was quite delightful, and we bottled just over 12 cases. We also had 3 gallons of a 50-50 of the oaked blend, and unoaked cabernet sauvignon that we bottled.

That leaves us with 10 gallons of unoaked chardonnay, 8 gallons of cabernet sauvignon, and 5 gallons of cabernet franc from 2004. We are going to explore making a sparkling wine from the chardonnay; as for the reds, we can keep them for possible blending with this year's vintage. Or bottle....