Week 17 (Oct. 7 - 11th)

This is a chimeric Frontenac cluster that John found in his personal vineyard. Growers need to watch out for these mutants during harvest because if this happened to be picked along with a batch of Frontenac blanc, the wine would have become a rosé just from these few berries.

This berry was 1/4 noir and 3/4 blanc! Cool, eh?

We get to crush and de-stem small batches by hand. We need to carefully remove as many (hopefully all) asian beetles as possible, as the smell of one crushed beetle can be detected throughout an entire batch of wine. This is a big problem in this day and age for commercial wineries too! Also, notice how the Marquette, and a few other reds, have been pressed and are now in carboys. These will continue to bubble until all sugar has been converted to ethanol and CO2 via the yeast.

A few whites being re-racked before fermented. We add an enzyme after pressing to drop out various proteins, which ends up leaving a sludge on the bottom of the carboy via gravity filtration. We rack the juice off of this before fermentation, then off the yeast after fermentation and maybe once more afterwards. During these stages the amount of air in the carboy above the juice isn't important, but in later stages of re-racking it is important to reduce the "head-space" to as little as possible. 

This machine may look fancy, and I guess it is since it cost more than $5,000, but it is actually pretty simple. It is an automated titrator, so all we need to do is insert the probe and calibrate it to two standards, add 5 mL juice and 45 mL DI H20 to each cup, and then press start. It adds NaOH incrementally, while mixing the solution with a propeller, until it balances the solution. Based off of how much NaOh is used it calculates and prints out a reading of every TA (titratable  (or total) acidity). A normal TA is anywhere 6 - 8 g/L, however our research grapes tend to come in around 10 - 12 (and therefore have a nice acid bite to them!).