2016 Bottling

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Published: Tuesday, 03 October 2017 08:33
Written by David DeCiero

After almost a full year, it was time to bottle the 2016's.  I ended up with about 45 gallons of wine from the grapes, so I was going to end up with around 225 bottles.  I have a pretty good routine down now with getting everything ready. So, I started the day before with cleaning all of the bottles by using the bottle sanitizer and some One Step.  Now, having to do 225 bottles was a bit tricky, since I only have an 81 bottle tree and a 45 bottle tree, so I had to do it two days before and take the already clean ones and put them upside down in boxes. 

The actual bottling day, I ran One Step through all of my lines for my Enolmatic, making sure everything was clean.  I then just got to work.  With my Enolmatic and my Italian floor corker, I can do all of this myself.  I just kept cranking them out, pausing only to switch carboys when they were empty.  I always do a couple magnums as well, so those give me a little rest while I fill them :)  After everything was bottled, the fun began with cleanup.  8 carboys had to be rinsed and sanitized, the Enolmatic had to be cleaned and I needed to get rid of the empty bags that held the corks.  All in all, it was a 4 hour job.  Once I was done cleaning, I just waited till the next day to put the labels on.  I use Uprinting.com for professionally printed labels, and they are extremely reasonably priced.

I look forward to another year of winemaking as the 2016's have now been laid down.  I find that these wines from this vineyard are best after 3-4 years, so 2019-2020 before I started to crack these open.

 

 

2016 MLF Complete

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Published: Saturday, 14 January 2017 16:51
Written by David DeCiero

The 2016 malolactic fermentation has now been completed!  I find that using my fermentation chamber and keeping the ambient temp at 70 degrees F gives the MLF bacteria a chance to get their job done by the beginning of January.  Since I had an abundance of carboys this year, I also had two outside the chamber with brew belts attached.  Those also completed at the same time.  I am always pretty happy with VP41 as it chomps through the malic acid pretty easily, even on my "acidic" wines from Rhode Island.  This was the second year I did not use BM45, instead using BM4x4.  This removed my problem with the amount of SO2 produced by that yeast.  This was the first year I used only one packet of VP41, so I saved about 30 dollars in the process.  I had always innoculated with way more than prescribed (1 packet does 66 gallons), so since I had about 45 gallons, I used 1 packet and it turned out fine.  I have added 30 ppm of SO2 and will check the free SO2 and rack in 1 month.  This tends to remove almost all of the lees and minimizes the loss of wine from racking.

 

More Articles ...

  1. Gearing Up for 2016
  2. 2016 Fermentation
  3. Winepress Modifications