2013 Muscat, day 15, Oct 6 2013 - off the gross lees

We took the wine off the gross lees this morning.

Fine bubbling still happening in the wine about to be racked.

Coming off the gross lees.

1.5 liters of mud in the third cb we racked.

I'd been fretting about whether to fine with bentonite at this step or to wait, as we did in 2011, until the next racking.  (We did not fine in 2012.)  I finally decided to write Doug at Presque Isle and see how he weighs in on the topic.  Two other things let me cool my heels, too.  First, I found some 2011 bottles of Muscat that had flocculation in them (and that's what you would have expected the bentonite to prevent), whereas I don't remember seeing protein haze in other years' bottles.  I can't remember what the 2nd thing is right now, but I'm sure it was life changing.

We went from 5gal + 5gal + 5gal + 0.5gal to 5+5+5, but we did that by distributing 2.75 liters of 2011 (clear - I was forbidden to use the hazy) wine across the carboys to top up.  (It's mixing oz and ml to get there, but we essentially lost 1.5 liters to the lees in each of the large carboys.)  If I'd been a little more quick we might have had the old wine evenly distributed across the carboys, but as it happens the have .5, .75, and 1.5 in them respectively.  We'll combine them at the next racking to even things out.  And we'll watch them to see if the behave differently than each other: if they do we'll recombine them sooner.

Will check so2 a little later in the day when things are a little more settled.

* 21:30: kind of gratifying to see settling happening quickly.  The top four inches of each cb is apple cider colored, and everything below is more milky.