Wines I'm Making: Pressing the 2025 Cabernet

It's that time of year. Today I pressed our 2025 Cabernet Sauvignon/Cabernet Franc. This year, we harvested no Sangiovese at all, so we won't be making any rosé, but 104 pounds of Cabernet grapes yielded 8.5 gallons of newly pressed wine. 

After a day of rest, I'll inoculate the new wine with starter to initiate a secondary (malolactic) fermentation, which converts some of the sharp malic acid in the wine into lactic acid, considerably softening it. Malolactic fermentation takes a month or two. The wine will be resting in a warm place in the house for that amount of time. 

Sometime around the middle of December, I'll rack the wine off the lees, lightly sulfite it, and add oak staves. Then the wine will rest until it's time to rack it again, in March or April. It will continue to rest through the summer until about this time next year, when it will get a final racking before it's bottled. Also today I sanitized bottles for the 2024 Cabernet, which I plan to bottle tomorrow.