Technology on Trial

I have had the opportunity to tryout a tablet through Verizon.  They want me to try some aps and use the tablet . I will say it takes some getting used to, but i think I am getting the hang of it. I have tried a few wine aps like my cellar. This app let's you categorize your wine . It is okay, but it does have some issues. for me it was a bit hard to get around. It could be a combination of just learning the tablet and an awkward app.  More to  follow.

Uplifting

Our newest wine, Uplifting, is now in the bottle. Last night we assembled a crew of five and we worked feverishly getting the 285 gallons bottled. Our crew knocked it out in a couple of hours. Thanks Jerry, Sam & Marti for the great work! Apollo tried to help out, at least with the pizza, but was soon asked to leave! Uplifting is made from Traminette grapes, so it is a white wine. It has a great aroma and taste which we will tell you more about soon. We had given it just a touch of sugar to soften it on the palate a bit.  I think it will be a hit for both dry wine fans and those that say they don't like a wine too dry. Now the bottles need some r&r from the rigors of bottling and then they will get labeled and capsuled. It should be available in the Cellar 426 Tasting room in by mid May!

 

Rocky's Red is in the Bottle

Last week we got a crew together and bottled our 2012 Rocky's Red. We bottled 380 gallons which  turns into 1,908 bottles or 159 cases. Here is how our "bottling line" worked:  Erich uncased the empty bottles and sparged them one by one with Nitrogen. Dwayne loaded them on the bottler and filled them. Jerry took them from Dwayne gave a shot of CO2 for protection and Amy put them in the corker and added the cork.  I was the end of the line and put the now filled/corked bottles into cases, moving the cases to pallets, and making sure our open tanks had a good dry ice cover to protect them from oxidation.  Our team rocked!   This semi sweet red is almost.

It was quite an evening as we really got a rhythm down and finished up in a little over 3 hours. Which included a short pizza break halfway through.  Not bad considering both our bottle filler and corker claim to do just around 55 to 60 cases per hour. Our crew really rocked!

Now Erich will be busy labeling the bottles,  capsules will be added and on March 23rd the tasting room will be filled once again with Rocky's Red. A semi sweet, soft red wine that is a wonderful remembrance of our late great winery friend.

Thanks to our friends Jerry and Dwayne for lending us a hand. It was actually a lot of fun!  We'll be bottling our next wine very soon..

Here is our initial attempt at bottling:

Then realizing we still had 1,900 bottles we decided to use higher tech equipment  (actually the above was the last bit of wine that came from the bottling unit).

Rocky's Red 2012

We're putting on the finishing touches on our 2012 Rocky's Red. We've completed our second round of filtering and now are prepping for bottling. The final steps include adjusting the so2 level to insure proper amounts post bottling, a sugar addition, and getting the temp up to a comfortable bottling temp of 60 to 64 degrees.

Our new labels for the Rocky's Red are complete (see below) and we got a bit of good news a couple of weeks ago as Rocky earned third place Midwest Wine Press's (midwestwine.com) Midwest Winery Dog of the Year competition!  A fitting tribute to a great dog that is dearly missed.

We should be bottling in the next 2 weeks if we can arrange the time and a crew. That would put Rocky's Red upstairs and ready for tasting by mid March.

On a side note Rocky's understudy Apollo greeted his first customers today and proceeded to sneak into the winery behind them. We'll have to work on his greeting skills a bit!

Filtering the Traminette

We ran thru our first filtering of the 2012 Traminette. This process removes matter that is suspended in the wine like yeast cells, tartrates, proteins, and pectins and helps clear it up.  This is the first round of filtering and you can see from the very bottom picture how clear it really does make the wine (that is taken looking down into the tank).You can see our filter which contains 37 filter pads made from cellulose fibers which trap the particles. We'll do another round of filtering just before bottling which will be a sterile filtering done with a finer celled filter pad that will trap all remaining yeast and particles.

We plan on bottling the Traminette in late January or early February.  It is turning out to be a beautiful semi dry white, which will be a nice addition and compliment to our current wines. If all goes well  it should be in the Tasting Room by early Spring 2013.

Oak Trial Results

The oak trials discussed in my previous post have been completed. Last week week we did aroma and taste testing to determine which oak would make the best wine from this grape variety (Chambourcin).  The bottles were rearranged in a random order and a blind tasting was done. We assembled a tasting panel and each person selected their 3 favorite wines ranking them in order. After comparing rankings the clear favorite turned out to be bottle number 3  which was the high mocha oak treatment.

Now we are awaiting the arrival of the bulk oak cubes so we can add them to the tank to begin the process of imparting the oak flavors into the wine. After gaining the desired level of oak the wine will be finished, bottled and the 2012 Sunset Red will be added to our tasting room fare!

As a side note, the wine we had left after our tasting panel finished their work was served at our Holiday Wine Dinner on December 8th. We had a lot of positive feedback on the wine and most can't wait for it to be available for purchase.

Winemaking

The wines from the 2012 harvest are coming along. We had 3 tons of Chambourcin grapes that we have split into 2 batches. One will produce a semi sweet red and the other will be a dry red. The dry red we will be oaking and tonight we put together an oak trial. We have 8 different styles of oak to choose from. The styles vary in the flavors they impart such as vanilla, mocha, or spice and how much "toast" they have. Each will impart a slightly different taste to the wine.You can see from the first picture they are "sticks" of oak known as staves. We filled up nine bottles with the dry Chambourcin and dropped a different set of staves in eight of the bottles. The ninth bottle acts as a control bottle. You can drop one or both of the staves that come with each flavor into a bottle depending on how much intensity you want.You can also vary the time the oak contacts the wine from one to two weeks.

We went ahead and have dropped both staves into the bottles and will keep them in there for a minimum of 2 weeks. This will impart the maximum flavoring and toast and we can then determine if we need to lighten it up for the actual wine.  After two or so weeks we will sample the 8 bottles and determine which one is best to move forward.

You may wonder why we are not using barrels for oaking. The simple answer is the cost and space. Barrels are a costly item for a new winery plus we wanted to make sure before we purchase them that we have our space planned out. Staves do a great job of imparting flavors like barrels do at a fraction of the cost. So this vintage we went with staves, but I am sure we will be investing in barrels in the near future as money allows.

So there you have a little insight into our winemaking process.We will keep you posted on our trials.