Bottling the 2012 Rosé Saignee

Thursday night was bottling night.  As I have referred to before, we decided to make a Rosé Saignee style wine for the Spring.

What this entails is immediately after crushing the Cabernet and Merlot, we pulled out 6 gallons of juice from our crushed fruit.  The theory is that this makes the main wine more flavorful.  By pulling out 6 gallons of juice the remaining fruit is more concentrated on the skins as it is fermenting.

The Rosé was more of an afterthought than anything else.  We pulled out six gallons so we would have enough after fermenting to fill one 5 gallon carboy.  Since we fermented this outside of the hotbox that was my wine closet, the Rosé just kept fermenting for a very long time since it was much cooler and we fermented in a carboy.

Before bottling we had to come up with the final blend.  The Rosé itself had good flavor but we wanted to round it out with "something".

Here is our official blending session:

Carsten was 'helping', notice most everything is out of his reach.

The final blend ended up being 80% our Rosé and 6.6% of three different wines: Chardonnay, Rosé of Tannant & Cote de Gasgione (Colombard and Ugni Blanc).

One last racking:

Gravity Siphon Racking, easy on the wine.

At one point in the process the Rosé was very cloudy.  Because we wanted to take a minimalist approach to this wine we did not want to filter it and were reluctant to use a fining agent.  What I ended up doing is putting the carboy outside two weeks ago overnight in a fermenting container (garbage can) filled with ice.  In the morning the wine was down to 42 degrees and a big percentage of the cloudiness was gone.  Voila, natural filtering.

The final product is 30 bottles (15 each) of Rosé.  We did not add any SO2, so this is definitely a drink now and finish through the summer product.

All for now.