Carmenere Project

During my days between postings something great has occurred. While picking the Petit Verdot at the school vineyard our instructor informed us that the Carmenere did not ripen fully due to a freeze on October 10, and therefore, anyone could take it! I was the first one to bite, and I took the best of the best grapes. By the end I used about 17 gallons worth of grape clusters, which ended up making about 7 gallons worth of must.

The first step was to manually destem the grapes. I estimate that this took me 6 hours total, and I listened to music sitting in this very chair the whole time. Notice my new wine rack in the photo.

The next step in this process was manually crushing each grape with my fingers. This was partially achieved during destemming, but I spent at least another two hours getting very sticky digging through the must to find whole berries. This still isn't totally done, but I've now inoculated the must with the yeast, which should help. As of now the yeast appear to be multiplying and the wine smells very much like bread dough. I'll be updating on this project again maybe with some really boring but important details assuming that everything goes as planned.

Some more details on the stuff: I measure the juice to be 23 Brix, which is a good number. That means I'll be able to achieve just over 13% alcohol assuming fermentation doesn't get stuck. I haven't measure the pH, but it's probably pretty high so I'm expecting to malolactate (is that a word?) the wine as much as possible, and maybe still have to lower it inorganically. The only thing I've added besides grapes and yeast are campden tablets, which release SO2 into the wine, killing everything that shouldn't be living. Later I'll add more to stabilize the wine, but not until I'm sufficiently happy with the progress of the malolactic fermentation, as sulfates inhibit it. The only other detail is my preliminary wine label design, as this should pump out 25-30 standard bottles to be drunk from 2011 to 2018. Check it out: