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Here’s Sam pressing the wine while I watch.

Here is the free barrel rack we got, with our almost free, but recently “blasted” barrel sitting on it. We spray painted the barrel rack with chrome paint, and now it’s the best-looking barrel rack in the world.

Here’s the inside of our winery. Yes, that’s how the paint is. I used all the extra paint from inside our house, but we didn’t quite have enough of some colors. I think it looks great. Notice our brilliant way of storing carboys. The white fermenters in there are what we used for fermenting our Cab. The barrels in this picture contain Sam’s Zin and his Zin port. The barrel rack holding up the barrels on the right was given to us by the folks at Revolution Wines, who will be amazed at how well it cleaned up. I’ll get a picture of that now.

It turns out that we didn’t really take a lot of pictures of the winemaking process, unfortunately. However, we have some, and I’m going to post them here for your enjoyment. Enjoy.

This first photo is of me sulphiting the grapes and answering a question from Zach, while Kevin watches.

Wednesday night we were at 1 brix. I don’t have any idea why the fermentation went so fast…the must never got above 80 degrees, and the air temp was not too bad (plus, I was running the A/C the whole damn time!). I’m sure more insulation, and the new PVC strips that just came in will make a big difference for next year, especially in our electric bill. But still, it just doesn’t make sense to me why we were dropping 6+ brix per day.

Anyway, yesterday morning, I drove out and rented a #40 basket press and brought it back to the winery. Sam, Margaret, Zach, Jeff, and I pressed it. Only one of the 5 fermenters was REALLY stinky. We kept that wine separate.

Once the pressing was done, we added ML bacteria, then proceeded to splash rack everything to start getting rid of the H2S. The wine was still fermenting a little, so we’re not worried that we introduced too much oxygen.

The racking was very effective and afterwards the H2S was only noticeable in the 1 fermenter that started out *really* stinky.

After the racking, I returned the press. On my way back, I got the idea of picking up some copper pipe and running the wine through that to further reduce the stink. I don’t exactly know how this works, but I’ve heard people suggest treating H2S with copper, so I figured what the heck. Now that I’ve had more time to research this, it looks like the most common thing to do is to add copper sulphate.

I got a 2 ft section of copper pipe from Home Depot and clamped it to the end of our racking tube. We splash racked the stinky wine through the copper, which seems to have eliminated the smell. We did a blind tasting and Margaret (the official “nose”) couldn’t figure out which was the “stinky” and which was “not stinky”. Then, we racked it again into kegs.

By the way, here’s a great article about preventing and treating H2S.

After that, while Sam prepared the steaks and put them on the grill, we racked the rest of the wine through the copper into a 60 gal. barrel and had enough left over to fill a 15 gallon keg.

So, there it is. We have about 100 gallons of Cab now, which will probably go down to 85 or so once we rack off the gross lees in a few weeks!

Today is the part of our drama where something goes wrong and everyone gets scared, but they know that our hero will find some sort of way out of the jam and we’ll live happily ever after with wine.

Yesterday, I started detecting a sulfur smell in the winery (and, for once, it wasn’t because I had been eating Thai food again…jk). I did some research, and it turns out that the yeast wasn’t happy and was/is giving off Hydrogen Sulfide. It’s a common problem, and one that’s curable if you identify it and treat it. Treatment just involves giving the yeast more food (nitrogen in particular) and then aerating the wine before fermentation stops, but after you press.

I added more yeast food this afternoon, and I’ll add more late tonight. The smell has started to go away. With some aerating, everything should be back to normal.

The other problem is that the wine is going to be ready to press tomorrow, but I want to give it a little more time on the skins (to get more color). So, to deal with this, I need to slow down the fermentation by cooling down the must. So, today, I went out and bought 5 30lb bags of ice and lowered them into the fermenters (inside of other bags so that we don’t accidentally water down the wine). This has already lowered the temperature by 4 or so degrees.

I’ve rented a press for Thursday. Are any of you available to help during the day? It’s possible that we could do it after work Thursday, but not ideal…because it would be dark.

The wine was fermenting up a storm this morning, and I had to turn on a fan to get some air into the winery before I could punch down the caps.

Things are going a little hotter than I want right now. At 7:00 this morning, the winery temp was 69 degrees, the cap was 85, and the wine was at 75. The one fermenter I tested this morning was at 19 Brix. So, that’s a drop of 6 brix in 24 hours. Not unusual, but faster than I want.

So, we’re going to cut back on the mid-fermentation addition of nutrients, and we’re going to turn down the thermostat in the winery to try to bring things a bit more under control.

All that said, I’m extremely happy about this wine.

I’m thinking about getting some more grapes this weekend. Is anyone interested in helping with picking and crushing on Saturday? Give me a call if so. At the very least, we’re going to drive down to Delicato winery this weekend or next and get some juice to make a couple carboys of white wine, and maybe some red too.

Evening Update:

Tonight, 3 of the fermenters were at 13.5 brix, and 2 were at 14. I turned the thermostat down to 66 and moved the fermenters a little bit towards the back of the room, where it’s about 2-3 degrees colder. We’ll see where we’re at in the morning.

The must tastes great and the color is starting to look wine-like.

-Chris

I didn’t wake up until 10:30 this morning, but I felt great when I finally did.

Temperature at 10:30: 68 degrees F. Each fermenter had a think cap, which I punched down. Then I tested the sugar and pH of each. They were at 25 brix this morning. Sam tells me it went up because of the sugar in the skins coming out.

pH ranged between 3.32 and 3.54. Because I’m using a cheap pH meter, I figure that an average of the readings (which turned out to be 3.426) is probably closest to the truth. I’m very happy with that.

I’ll punch again this afternoon, and then again tonight. I’m planning to take a pH and sugar reading from each fermenter once a day. Tonight I’ll check again, because I’m anxious to see the Brix go down so that I can confirm that fermentation is happening and so I can get an idea of how quickly it’s happening.

3:00

Punched down and tested one of the fermenters: 22.5 brix!

8:00

Punched down and tested all 5. All were between 22 and 22.5 brix

Joe and I drove the truck out to Deer Creek Vineyard in Elk Grove this morning to get the cabernet sauvignon grapes. When we got there, the crushing was well underway. Most people were getting 125-250lbs. We talked to the vineyard manager and showed him our macrobin and said we ordered 1000. We got about half of that from the grapes that had been picked earlier, but then they ran out of grapes and had to send the pickers out for more.

Eventually we got our 1000 lbs and drove back to Sac.

Initial Readings:

23.8 Brix
21 ppm free SO2
pH 3.23
TA .7
Temp: 76 degrees F

When we got back, we added 17g Potasium Metabisulphite, which raised the must up to about 35-40ppm free SO2.

We split the must into 4 44 gallon primary fermenters and brought them into the winery. The fermenters were too full at this point, so we moved must from each of the 4 into a 5th. Each primary has about 30 gallons in it.

We tested and recorded the brix and pH of each fermenter separately.

Additions:

125g Lalvin D254 yeast (25g / fermenter)
13.5g Pectic Enzyme (2.7g / fermenter)
Superfood…I think 12.5g / fermenter…does anyone remember exactly?

Thanks to Zach, Joe, Kevin, Margaret, and Sam for helping out!

Later, we had an incredible BBQ (thanks to Piper and Dave for the food!) and drank an incredible amount of wine.