09:00
Outside: 59 F, clear.
Cellar: 73 F.
Sauv. Blanc: 77 F, short reading +5 Brix, long reading 3 Brix. Thin shag but still sizzly. No foam at all at the top of the tube but lots of solids in the bottom third. Looks likely that the gross lees this year will be way more gross than usual. Different grape than we've used before, bt seems much more likely to me that it's the results of foot crushing.
Syrah: 74 F and 1.7 Brix on the short scale. Punched slowly to try and get a better sense of the depth of the cap. Dunno, but deeper than I guessed a few days ago. Mike Savno's been in touch offering to help press on Sunday. Timing is good.
Still no chat about malo - still I'm in favor of letting the wine and cellar decide on their own for the Syrah. But for the Sauvignon Blanc? I haven't done any reading on what folks on the more natural side usually do with the varietal. We can't cold stabilize it, can we? Put the juice into a floating lid tank and put that tank in a 55 gallon fermenter and fill the space in between with ice water? Stay home from work for a week re-icing the water?
Re the Brix readings. It's that time of the ferment when I'm reminded that the short and long scale hydrometers disagree with each other. I trust the short scale measurements. But I don't think they indicate the long scale is wrong at the high end, where the long scale and the refractometer pretty much agree. And we don't have any device to correlate the lowest readings at. Clinitest tablets? I've never heard much happiness about them. Leave it a lone for another year. Yep.
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