Bottling Beckstoffer

I recently bottled my 2012 Carneros Merlot that I made from Beckstoffer’s Las Amigas vineyard.  I bought these from M &M.  I was impressed by the freshness of the grapes and the size of the berries.  They were extremely small and flavorful.  I followed my normal winemaking procedure, except for one small difference.  They were at 26 Brix so I decided to water it back with 6.0 g/L tartaric acid to get to 25 Brix.  In hindsight, I shouldn’t have done this.  26 Brix is not too far off normal, so I should have left it alone.  Next time I’ll know, but I was trying to just make a decent wine with no flaws, so I thought 25 would be better.  I probably thinned out the wine a little bit, but don’t know for sure.  Anyway, the bottling process was the same for this wine as all the other wines.  I set up the enolmatic and everything.  I had 12 gallons to do, and it took me about 45 minutes by myself.  I didn’t have any real hiccups, as the only thing that slowed me down was changing the carboys.  The cleanup then took another 30 minutes, but wasn’t too bad since the carboys had almost no sediment due to my racking schedule.  I put everything aside for 3 days for the corks to reexpand, and in the meantime printed and put on the labels.  When I was putting them in the new racks I built, I realized I was running out of room, so might have to build some more racks.  Good thing I didn’t dismantle the jig from the last time.