2016 Chardonnay, day 339

Holy moly, long time no post.

With the summer new wine party not happening this June we've let the wine cruise in it's carboys.  But we're getting ready to taste & bottle and potentially make way for a batch of 2017 reds.  2 days ago we picked up corks and more clear bottles from Pagano at Brooklyn Terminal Market and put a couple of carboys up on the racking shelf.  Gird yourself.

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Afternoon & 10 gallons bottled.  Zero sediment in the carboys.  Good tasting chardonnay.  No metabisulfites added - the wine was at about 15 ppm and I let it ride.  Some bottles got more aerated than I would have liked, but so it goes.

I did not taste the CB that was questionable back in the spring: will do so.  There's also a 3 gallon CB, which might be begging to become vermouth...

2016 Chardonnay, day 177: last racking

Maybe a month later than I hoped, but otherwise pretty much average for us, we've just done our last racking before bottling.

Looking into a 5 gal CB, the lees were
thin had had a little crystalline character.

Three of the carboys were very similar - good color, a little tart but only a little.  Clean.  Lemon and banana?  Yes.  Each of these three tested at about 15 ppm free SO2 by Titrette.  We had not added any sulphur up to this point and I opted for a very modest boost, aiming at under 10 ppm more using 3 ml of 10% solution for every 5 gallons.  (Yes, I realize, I will be booted out of the natural wine society.)

And then there was the outlier carboy - the one that came up weirdly cloudy when we racked on day 44 back in November.  Today it had much less nose than the others, and was downright prickly to the tongue - not frizzante, but unpleasantly prickly.  I racked it but will not blend it into any of the other wine, and might choose not to bottle it - drag.  It also tested just slightly lower for SO2 - 14 ppm.

So we've gone from 5+5+5+5 to 5+5+questionable 5+3+1, using one of the good carboys to top the others.

2016 Chardonnay, day 101: a silly malolactic longer

See that tiny horizontal chain of bubbles at the top of the wine in the neck?  That's all that's left from the thin priest's collar of CO2 from the MLF that was going on.  The very slightest activity in all four vessels.

When this round of fermentation is definitely over we'll rack for the last time (I hope) before bottling.