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Keeping Accurate and Adequate Records
While it
isn't the more romantic part of making your own wine, record keeping
will give you a tremendous advantage as you develop your skill and
style of winemaking. We've learned over the past few years the many
things we want to compare or recollect accurately in order to make
informed decisions.
One of the decisions home winemakers are faced with is what sort of
vessel to use for aging your wine. Although glass and stainless steel
are very acceptable and you can even add oak chips or blocks to
incorporate the oaked flavor.
Because we generally don't care for oaked wines, we choose to use barrels which no longer will impart oak flavor to the wine. We have elected to use 'exhausted' oak barrels because the wine concentrates differently in wood than in glass or stainless, thus aging is different. We have used
refurbished barrels too. We've had the some good results with dry ice blasted barrels from
Barrel Blasting. The barrels they sell are of the highest quality and
come from some of the most highly acclaimed wineries in napa and
sonoma county.
Back to record keeping...If you elect as we do to use oak barrels, you should start a barrel
inventory immediately. Keep track of storage, sanitization, what wine
the barrel is used for (vintage, varietal). Record your source for the
barrel and if you will have more than one barrel, mark the barrel in
some permanent fashion so you will always know which is which. Don't
laugh....it gets confusing to think back with clarity after a while.
Even before crush, we are keeping records. Of course we are in touch
with the grower who will be supplying our grapes and hearing the brix
numbers for a week or two in advance. When we go to harvest or pick up
our grapes, we take our refractometer and do our own brix reading.
Even though destemming and crushing will alter the number, it is very
informative for comparison purposes in subsequent vintages to be able
to look back and see reference points. We prefer our brix numbers to
be not less than 22.5 and not higher than 25. Our ideal range is
within 23 and 24.5 - outside that range the flavor of the grape, even
taking standard measures to adjust, never are quite right.
We then create a unique sheet for each of our varietals. Each sheet is
headed with the vintage, varietal, appellation and potentially the
vineyard designation. An example is:
2006 Cabernet Sauvignon, Chalk Hill - Windsor Oaks Vineyards
Also at the top we indicate the specifics of the following:
- Picked by: Us or vineyard staff
- Picked on: date harvested
- Time collected: Time of day we began harvesting or picked up the fruit
- Date crushed: We have picked up harvested fruit late in the
afternoon (it has been kept in cold storage) and crushed the
following am (this is not the ideal situation)
- Refractometer brix in vineyard
- Initial hydrometer reading during crush
- pH reading
- Date and am or pm of inoculation
We also set up primary fermentors that we map so we can keep
accurate records. We make a drawing at the top of the sheet. An example would be for 1/2 ton of grapes:
Then we start our readings records. Each morning and evening we
record the temperature and hydrometer reading in each
fermentor. We do this just before we mash the cap. This gives
us a pretty good idea of when the primary fermentation will
finish and we can plan accordingly.
When we reach the final days of primary fermentation, we
prepare our press and the designated barrel and top-off
vessels. Of course you never know just how much wine you will
have, so we try to have more than enough top-off vessels
available. Be sure to label the vessels as you fill them if you
will be making more than one varietal, etc. We record which
barrel we are using to age the wine and what date we press.
After the wine is initally in barrel, you will be topping off
very frequently for the first few months. We record the date of
each top-off. At that time we also look at the wine, smell the
wine in the barrel and in a small glass and make sure the locks
are clean and in good order. We make any notes of good or bad
observations.
We also record racking dates, fining dates and bottling dates.
We've found that by keeping these records, it helps us to decide how to
handle the current project and it is invaluable to avoid racking our
brains trying to remember accurately what really happened last year...
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