Tuesday, December 8, 2009

Filtering the Viognier

So after cold stabilizing for a few weeks the wine is ready to be filtered. I talked about cold stabilizing for a brief moment a few posts back but to refresh your memory we turned the temperature of the tank way down to make sure that the proteins could be taken out of the wine.  Stephen came with 2 different glasses of wine into the tasting room, one pre-filter and one post-filter. Can you believe those are the same wine? After tasting them both the filtered wine is much more focused but the flavor profile is very similar.

So I went out to the barrel room to see how this was done and basically a large hose is connected to the stainless steel tank (we were filtering the Les Vents de Anges Viognier) and the hose pushes wine through the machine in the picture below. This machine sends the wine through a series of filters and it comes out the other hose back into a neighboring tank. We monitored the pressure during the process to make sure that there was not any back up. Sometimes if there is a lot of yeast or sediment, wine will be forced through the filter and not processes as finely.

After we filtered the whole thing we were left with the lees, yeast, and bentonite in the bottom of the tank we started from. The yellow color is the yeast and the gray color is the bentonite. Stephen encouraged me to taste what was left over in the tank and it was a really interesting flavor. It looked like it was going to be very granular but it was very smooth and creamy, which attributes to the creaminess of some Chardonnay. But it was also rather tart! Quite the experience, I wished I could scoop it up and let everyone in the tasting room try it!




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