Wines I'm Making: 2015 Cabernet Bottled

Bottling by hand siphoning

Yesterday I finally got around to bottling our 2015 Cabernet Sauvignon/Cabernet Franc. It was a short job as our 25 vines (21 Cab Sauvignon, four Cab Franc) produced a tiny harvest that yielded only three gallons of finished wine, or 15 bottles. The low yield was in part because of a row of overgrown trees in my neighbor's yard that have increasingly shaded the vines over the years. This spring, I persuaded him to remove them, as he had wanted to anyway. I'm hoping the greatly increased sunshine now will result in both better yields and fewer problems with mildew.

Siphon and bottles ready

I tasted the wine as I was bottling it. It promises to be very good—perhaps as good or better than the 2014, which has been the best wine from our little vineyard to date.  2016 was a disaster—so little fruit that we made no red wine at all, only 15 bottles of rosé from the combined fruit of the 25 Cab vines and our nine Sangiovese vines. I'm hoping 2017 we'll be the turnaround year.  Below is a finished case of corked wine. Now it's time to design the label for the 2015 wine.

Wines I'm Making: 2015 Wines Pressed

I pressed our 2015 Cabernet and Sangiovese wines the other day. We ended up with only two gallons of Sangiovese, three gallons of Cabernet Sauvignon/Cabernet Franc--the smallest harvest we've ever had. This appears to have been typical even at commercial wineries around the county--very low yield this year. The wines are now resting, ready for inoculation to initiate malolactic fermentation. I'm also in the middle of a hard cider fermentation and trying to make wine from the neglected Zinfandel grapes (mostly raisins) my neighbor gave me.

Wines I'm Making: 2015 Grape Harvest

I picked our grapes this year on September 19, which is about three weeks earlier than usual (although only five days earlier than last year, which was likewise early). Because of the heat and dry conditions, many grapes were already beginning to turn to raisins. Fruit set was also very poor this year--the worst it's ever been. The harvest was tiny. I took in only 18.7kg or 41.4lbs of Cabernet and 12.8kg or 28.2lbs of Sangiovese. We normally harvest anywhere from two to three times that much. The crushed cabernet must measured 26.0 Brix at a pH of 3.62 (pH squared times Brix = 340.7). The crushed Sangiovese must measured 22.0 Brix at a pH of 3.57 (pH squared times Brix = 280.4). I usually aim for a Brix reading of about 25 for the Cabernet and about 23 for the Sangiovese. I lightly sulfited both containers and set them aside in a cool place for a pre-soak.

I inoculated the juice on the morning of the third day, September 22, using the Rockpile yeast for both. Ordinarily, I press the Sangiovese after about 18 hours to make a rosé, but we had so little fruit and because of work conflicts, I had to leave it longer than that, so, by default,  I'm fermenting the Sangiovese as a red wine this year for the first time in many years. I'm trying to decide whether to blend the two varieties. I may have no choice. I ended up with only about three gallons of each, which, when pressed, will reduce to about two gallons each. That would require using four one-gallon containers, which is a pain (no one seems to make two-gallon glass containers suitable for handling wine), so it will be easier to combine them.

So, fermentation is under way. I'm also doing a hard cider fermentation at the moment. More soon.

[Update: In the end, I decided to leave the two red wines unblended for the time being. As of today (October 6), the wines are resting, awaiting inoculation for malolactic fermentation.]