But before jumping into the bin of cold soaking pinot grapes let's catch up on the previous adventures.
'09 Syrah
This year the syrah came in more than a month earlier than last year's incredibly late end of October pick date. On the 21st of Sept we drove the f150 out to Gilbert Vineyards on the Wahluke Slope to pick up what turned out to be some incredibly clean (and tasty) fruit.
We had a small but highly skilled sorting and crushing crew in Oly this year and managed to sort in a record 2 hours followed by another hour or two on the rickety old manual crusher/destemmer rented from a facility known more for beer making and hydrophonics than winemaking (winemaking is like 5 fiddle out of 3).
After the whirlwind we hustled back down to the bay to wrap up the work week.
And two days later I flew back to press and get this stuff in the barrel.
easy peasy!
'09 Roussanne
Next up is our first dip into the white wine world. If you recall from the bad trannies post a few months back we'd picked up a stainless tank just for this purpose.
Dan stayed in SF for the Roussanne pickup giving our Marketing department (Brian) the chance to jump into the romantic world of waking up really f'in early to drive to some remote CA location and buy grapes only to load up the truck and drive back.
Dark and early in the AM
The drive to plymouth
Charlie Havill and son at BellaGrace Vineyards
Nice looking Roussanne fruit
Two of our bins loaded up and weighed for travel
back to the city
After getting the fruit back into the city we started our virgin run at the white process:
sort
crush
cold soak
press
rack
ferment cool
rack
age in tank
Currently the roussanne is at about 60f and at around 4 brix. We're looking forward to racking off the lees and letting the relatively short tank aging begin. We'll have pix of the rest of this process shortly.
1 comment:
Nice recap, and good times Deux Punx!!
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