Riesling

500 pounds of Riesling (WWAWA) came on September 16. Again, we were notified on Wednesday, but didn't head out to the Cellar (http://www.cellar-homebrew.com/store/catalog/) for yeast until Friday. We did learn something from the previous week; I called ahead and made sure they have the Rudsheimer that we were wanting, and they had one left.....

The fruit looked great, as you can see. The readings were good: Brix 22.8, TA 0.72 and pH 3.14. The Davis monograph would have the brix be 20.5-22, TA 8-10, and pH 3.2 - 3.4, but our previous good rieslings were not necessarily in this range. Charles, Dr Z and Elaine picked up in the morning and dropped off at the 31st Street Alley winery, and the Z's went off to exercise. We headed up to the Cellar, again, to get acid blend and a hydrometer--hadn't really been able to measure the syrah, since we had appeared to have misplaced the hydrometer. We were thinking we needed to manipulate the syrah and decrease the sugar levels before we would get too much alcohol in the must and it would not ferment to as much dryness as we would want.


Stemming and crushing was done quickly, although there was a bit of a shuffle making sure we had enough containers; the two big 44 gallon fermentors were full of the Syrah. We ended up fitting the must into the two smaller fermentors to sit overnight. We cleaned all the carboys for the next day's pressing of the Riesling. And then, of course retired to Piazza Bitsini for refreshment.