Wines I'm Making: Bottling 2023 rosé and 2022 Cabernet

I spent some of the weekend of February 10 and 11 attending to winemaking chores I had been putting off. I bottled our 2023 rosé of Sangiovese, made labels, and got the labels on and did the same for our 2022 Cabernet Sauvignon/Cabernet Franc. We ended up with 15 bottles of the rosé and 62 bottles of the Cabernet, which is pretty typical. This past weekend I also racked and sulfited our 2023 Cabernet and added oak on the assumption that the malolactic fermentation has probably gone as far as it was going to go, although I did not go to the trouble of doing a paper chromatography test to see. It is what it is.... I treated the wine for a slight hydrogen sulfide smell, which is a reminder that next year I'll need to go more to provide yeast nutrients during fermentation.

 

Wines I'm Making: 2022 Cabernet Pressed

Yesterday (October 15) I pressed our 2022 wine – Cabernet Sauvignon/Cabernet Franc and Sangiovese together for the first time in the 19 years I've been making wine from our backyard vineyard. Because there was so much damage to the Sangiovese this time from the September heat wave that hit us, making rosé (as we usually do from the Sangiovese) didn't make much sense; there wasn't enough fruit. After a 15-day fermentation, we ended up with just under 11 gallons of new wine from the blend of grapes, and that will yield about 10 gallons of finished wine (50 bottles). For various reasons, I was unable to get the yeast I usually use and ended up using the Prise de Mousse strain, which is designed for white wine and rosé fermentations, so a lot in 2022 will be unusual. The wine is likely to be somewhat different from what we usually make, but we won't know for about a year, when the wine is ready to bottle. 

Wines I'm Making: Harvest 2022

2022 was a difficult year for winemaking for us for a number of reasons. The main problem was that harvest coincided this year with the Sonoma County Art Trails open studio event I participate in, and there was a Santa Rosa Symphony concert on the weekend of harvest (also the second weekend of Art Trails, October 1 & 2; I do the backstage photography for the Symphony). There was a severe, week-long heat wave (with temperatures reaching 118º in Santa Rosa at the peak in September). We even had hail early in the year, although that caused little harm.

The result of all this was that there was a lot of damaged fruit this year (the Sangiovese, in particular, suffers from the heat and drought) and I was pressed for time during the initial stages of the winemaking. We got so little Sangiovese that for the first time in many years we will make no rosé this year. There were many split berries and these were being visited by swarms of honeybees and yellow jackets. 

I threw the Sangiovese in with the Cabernet to make a field blend. Unable to get to The Beverage People (our local wine supply store) at the right time, I gave up trying to buy the yeast I wanted and started the Cabernet/Sangiovese fermentation with a vial leftover from last year, Prise de Mousse. Prise de Mousse is a strain optimized for white wine and rosé fermentations, but I imagine it will work to make a red wine well enough. We ended up with about 15 gallons of crushed grapes and juice. The grapes were harvested on September 30 at about 24.5º Brix. We got about 119lbs of Cabernet. I didn't weigh the Sangiovese, but it was probably another 20lbs or 30 lbs. 

 

I'm not sure what the result will be. The proof will be in the wine. I look forward to trying the finished wine, probably about a year from now. On a bit of a tangent, I got stung by a dead bee while de-stemming the grapes, not by a live bee but by a dead bee that had become mixed up in the crushed grapes. So, now, if anyone ever asks me "Was you ever bit by a dead bee?" I can say "yes."