Thursday, October 8, 2009

Birthdays & Barrels

We had a few exciting things happen around the vineyard today, we worked on some wines and we had a birthday! So happy birthday to Kris, our wine club manager! We had some cake at work to celebrate the day.


We also pressed off the Rosé. It looks like Stephen has not decided whether it is going to be a dry or off-dry Rosé. This has been sitting in a bin on the skins for 48 hours which gave it a nice light color. We were thinking about pressing off the Rosé yesterday (after only 24 hours) but the color of the wine was too light. During the pressing, we treated the grapes as white wine grapes and pressed them gently. 





At the end of the day I went to the barrel room and I almost ran straight into some freshly moved (and filled) barrels. Turns out those barrels are now filled with the Touriga.  The barrels have little toppers on them... I'm not sure of the technical name. If you watch the little toppers they bubble every once in a while, which is actually carbon dioxide being released into the air, without letting oxygen in to the wine. The carbon dioxide is released by the yeast as they turn the sugar to alcohol. 


Another thing we have started is the Facebook Cabernet Franc. Apparently the decision to let the native yeast act as the fermenting agent was passed on the Facebook poll and so that has just begun. The bins are going to be put outside to naturally heat the must and let heat and natural sugar encourage yeast multiplication. Make sure to friend us on Facebook, so you can vote on the next step for making the "Facebook Franc"... this way you can brag to all of your friends once the wine is released!


We are moving through harvest and we have a few more varietals to pick and a lot of wines to finish. I am excited to see what happens tomorrow... always something new with our grapes! 
 

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