2012 blended reds bottled

We bottled 10 gallons of the 90% Merlot / 10% cab Franc this morning.  That leaves maybe 5 gallons of straight Cab Franc for us to play with.  (Note to selves: buy a bottle tree for next year.)

2012 reds, blended, partially bottled

Lori tasted the reds again this morning and decided to stick with the 90% Merlot, 10% CF mix.  We put together 10 gallons of this in carboys, and bottled the remainder of the 14 gallon Merlot fusti straight, and the same for the remainder of a 3 gallon CF carboy.  Tomorrow or some time during the week we'll bottle the blend.

2014 Muscat, day 244, 10 gallons bottled

Good, bad or ugly we bottled 10 gallons of the Muscat this morning for the summer party.  We still need to make our decisions about the 2012 reds.

2012 Reds, sulphites raised 10 ppm

I had been thinking of raising these by 20 ppm prior to bottling, but looked back over notes and saw that we'd raised them 30 ppm back in November of 2012.  Can't be a heck of a lot left - there were subsequent rackings, but still I decided to keep things on the low side.  Didn't use 10% solution - just bought a decent scale so I could measure out tenths of a gram and diluted the right amount of meta in a random amount of water.

2012 reds, time to get serious

We've draw off 187 ml bottles of the 2012 Merlot and Cab Franc.  Bringing them to cellar temp and we'll taste them for blending over ne next couple of days.  When we looked at this last year we were leaning toward 10% Cab F, and if we stick to that we're going to have a lot of it to bottle straight - 6 or 7 gallons, I think.  Even more if we decide to bottle any of the Merlot straight, and I think we might.

I've downloaded to sulphite calculator from fermsoft.com (on the recommendation of Alison Crowe in her book).  Why the heck hadn't I done this before.  Excellent!

And looking back to a May 2014 post I see that Mike and I bottled a 3 gallon CB of the 2012 Merlot then.  Jeez, where is it?  I don't remember drinking it - or labeling it.  Drag!  Now we need to search the mystery cases.

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Quickie Ph reading: 3.86.  That puts the amount of meta to add to the 14 gallons of Merlot to raise it 20 ppm @ 1.86 grams.  Lat addition was in November of 2012 when we added what we thought would raise the level by 30 ppm.  Maybe I should only shoot to raise by 10 now?

2014 Muscat day 231, popped stoppers

Oh, yeah, that's right, sometimes after racking I like to use bubblers rather than stoppers.  This time we just put the stoppers back in and two of them popped at different times since racking.  I don't know how long either was out before we noticed.  Sigh.

2014 Muscat day 230, 3rd rack & blend

Well, it seems that no matter what resolutions we make on crush day, we always bottle too late.

This morning we tasted the three cb's of Muscat.  Much better than a month or two ago when I thought we might toss it.  Color is fab - dandelion, that's a photo of it from this morning.  Initial pretty intense floral nose, but it dissipates in 15 minutes or so - too bad.  We found variations in the carboys and found that if we blended the wine and let it sit a little the acid wasn't as whack and the the mouthfeel was pretty nice.

So we decided to rack and blend everything, losing a couple or three liters in the process.  We backfilled with some of the wine we bottled very early from this same making.  (We went to backfill with one of the remaining 2010 bottles but found it metallic.)

We'll let it settle through the week and bottle for the June party.