Pressing the 2012 Cab Merlot.

Today was "Surprise the ferment is done and we need to press right now" day.

Small rotary style basket press.

For those of you keeping track at home, ferment was declared over 7 hours shy of one week after inoculation.  Clearly our experiment with the heated closet and speeding up the ferment was successful.

Press took less time than we thought it would be mainly because we had the good press this time.  This was good as I had a soccer game for the Men's team at 9 PM and Nate didn't want to stay up all night pressing.  Here is the same post from last year, notice the horrid ratchet style press:  http://tobinblog.blogspot.com/2011/11/press-day.html

Notably we pressed last year on November 8th, this year on October 22nd.

Here is the final product now in our bulk aging facility:

Behind you will see portions of the 2011 Syrah recently bottled.

In addition we also have the six gallons of rose.  So approximately 550 pounds of fruit yields 36 gallons before we rack off the gross lees.  I anticipate that we will end up with 30 gallons after the racking.

The house smells like a winery.

Currently we are fermenting, thus the title of this post.

This year we tried to take control of the temperature of the ferment.  In the past we think it was too cool.  A hotter ferment will be faster and theoretically it will lend to more extraction.  The Syrah from last year was pretty light colored when all was said and done.  We want this to be a bolder Bordeaux style wine.

To get this hotter ferment, we had to find a smaller space where we could manipulate the temperature.  I'm not going to crank the heat up to 75 in the entire house.  So what better spot to use than my wine closet?  Before:

Before.

After.

Currently

Yes, that is a heater in the upper left of your picture.  This is the fermenting room.  It is working quite well, the temperature of the must is on day 3 of Ferment 2012 is hovering around 25C (77F).  We have this fancy pH meter that measure the pH and the temperature.

In addition to the hotter ferment, to make a more robust and full wine we also used a technique that I am sure has a fancy name.  But what I did was pull six gallons of juice out of the must before we fermented.  This leaves a more concentrated end product.  By pulling juice out of the must it concentrates the remaining juice by keeping all the skins for more extraction.  Actually separating that much juice out of the must is a lot easier to do in theory than in practice.  But in the end we will also have around 5 gallons of Rose hopefully ready to go for next summer and a more concentrated main blend.

5 gallon and 1 gallon carboys of Rose wine.

That is all for now.  Currently I am punching the cap down three times a day. 8 AM, 4 PM and Midnight.  This prevents the grape skins that form on the surface of the fermenting wine to become hard and dried out and potentially forming a cap that limits the amount of oxygen getting to the fermenting wine.  The Rose I just agitate every time I punch the cap.

edit: Today we added the second dose of fermaid.  It's this little clay looking powder that is basically like crack for the yeast.  It makes sure the fermentation doesn't get stuck by giving the yeast something to eat.  We only went with a half dose because I just measured the fermenting wine and our brix is down to 12.5 from an original of 24.  That means we are about 50% of the fermentation done.  Ideally we would have added the second dose of fermaid one third into fermentation.  Apparently the fermaid is like crack to not only the yeast but other things as well if it doesn't get used up by the yeast.  So over dosing could be very very bad.

Crush for Vintage 2012

Yesterday our grapes arrived in Woodinville at Noon.  So it was time to make some wine.  Unfortunately mother nature and our grower decided that the same day as the Seahawks hosting the Patriots would be the day he picked.  Thus I had to sell my tickets.  Fortunately this was an easy game to sell.  And boy, what a game.  But I digress.

We received 24 boxes, 16 Cabernet Sauvignon  and 8 Merlot.  We paid for 500 pounds of fruit and as always we got a little bit extra.  We weighed 9 of the boxes and the average box was coming in at 23 pounds.  So our final tally was around 552 pounds.  Unlike last year, we were the very first order to come out of the truck so we didn't pick up anything extra.  (That's how we ended up with the Tempranillo.)

Casa de Tobin garage provided the crushing/destemming facility.

For the record, both the Cabernet and the Merlot is from Doc Stewart Vineyard in the Wahluke Slope.  Our supplier is a grower called Gilbert Vineyards.  At crush our stats we were working with were:
Brix 24
PH 3.38

The crusher is on the right, we rented it for the day.  Luckily we were able to do this in the garage since it was raining really hard.  Those white tubs that look like garbage cans are the fermenters.  They are basically just food grade plastic garbage cans.  We have two 20 gallons and a 32 gallon this year.  We are co-fermenting the fruit.  This means that our Merlot and Cab are already blended so inherently we will have 67% Cab and 33% Merlot in the finished product.

A wise man once said, it takes a lot of good beer to make great wine.

Technically this is Carsten's second crush, but we did not bring him up to Shoreline last year for crush.  So Carsten's first crush.  Jessica was understandably reluctant to put him down in my garage.  Between the wine grapes making a mess everywhere and random ladders just leaning against things, it's probably not the best place for a newly walking inquisitive little person.

Carsten and Jessica adventured to West Seattle.

The actual crushing process does not take that long.  But the clean up is brutal.  What does one do with 24 boxes?

This space had to be sanitized so the Mercedes can go back to taking up the spot.

Check back soon, I will have another post about fermenting and our new dedicated fermentation room.

Wine Blending, the 2011 Syrah

Because 2011 was what they call a "challenging" vintage in Washington, it was necessary for us to do some blending with our finished Syrah.  (We are also blending the Tempranillo, but let's focus on the Syrah in this post shall we?)

First off, the Syrah is good.  It is what you would call an old world style.  This is not your monster Australian Shiraz or even a classic Washington or California Syrah.  We are talking 13% alcohol, little oak and subtleties; think à la française.

Our plan entering the night was to add some Grenache and Mourvèdre.  We had already had one blending session where we tasted the Syrah with a Grenache and they melded nicely.  The Grenache filling out a few holes in the Syrah.  But we wanted a well made (but cheap) Mourvèdre to add a little more body and more importantly, color.

Nate found a Spanish Mourvèdre, technically a Monastrell as that is what the grape is known as in Spain, that fit the bill.  So it was time to taste.

It takes a lot of glasses and measurements to get the ratio how we wanted it.

In the end we settled on quite a bit more blending than was our original intent.  The blend is going to be 57% Syrah, 28% Grenache and 15% Mourvèdre.  Not exactly a typical GSM blend, but a GSM nonetheless.  For those curious, that is a Washington Syrah, Australian Grenache and Spanish Mourvèdre.

And more importantly, it's good.  At least Nate and I were extremely happy with the final blend.  We will be bottling next weekend.  It will definitely be ready to drink come the holidays. 

Why not this weekend you ask?  Because Sunday is the day our grapes arrive.  After a quiet summer, the wine making activities are going to ramp up dramatically over the next three weeks.  We are going to crush and destem at Chateau Tobin this year.

Watch this space for updates.