|
Sunday September 29, 2002 |
| 5:00 am |
Jack & Neil leave Los Gatos in Jack's flatbed truck. |
| 9:30 am |
Jack & Neil arrive in the Anderson Valley at the valley
foothill vineyard. While the truck
is being loaded with 6,000 pounds of grapes (for
$3,000), Jack
& Neil run over to Navarro winery to pick up Neil's wine futures that
he bought last year.
They pick up two varieties of Pinot Noir grape, 4,000 lbs of a Beaujolais clone and
2,000 lbs of a Jackson clone. The brix they
measured on the Beaujolais is 23.5° and on the Jackson is 25°.
|
| 10:00 am |
John, Sam and Brian start working on organizing the place
to make room for the extra juice we'll be getting from the almost free ton
of Jackson Pinot.
They made room for the nine primary fermenters, two 30 gallon buckets,
and what seems like dozens of smaller containers.
|
| 11:10 |
Jack & Neil are back on the road heading South to our
winery. |
| 1:00 pm |
|
| 3:45 pm |
Jack & Neil arrive at the winery (Brian's house).
Six 1,000 pound bins. The back four hold the Beaujolais clone Pinot
and the front two hold the Jackson.
Don't they look awesome! They tasted wonderful too. |
|
So we started by crushing the Beaujolais clone Pinot and
transferring it directly into the press.
We are going to make champagne and we don't want any skin contact
during fermentation. |
|
We pressed around 1000 pounds of grapes and put all of the juice in
primary fermenter #3. |
|
 |
|
Here's fermenter #3. Doesn't look very appetizing, does it? |
|
Now that fermenter #3 is full of skinless juice, we take the skins and
seeds from the press and distribute them among the other Beaujolais
fermenters. |
|
 |
|
Neil opened up a couple of bottles of his Pinot that he had on reserve
with Navarro. Excellent! We are all sure that this is what our
wine is going to taste like. |
|
After crushing the 4,000 pounds of Beaujolais clone Pinot, it is now
time to crush the Jackson clone Pinot. |
|
Two more tons to crush... |
|
Motor controller paid for itself. Oh yeah, it was free. |
|
We ran out of primary fermenters and had to make do with anything that
would hold the weight. The liner is two layers of food-grade polyethylene. |
|
Got to keep good notes! Especially since we have two varieties
of grape and two fermentation methods. |
|
Pictures of the crew. Boy were we tired!
 |
|
 |
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Now outside... We look tired, but feel worse.
 |
|
 |
| 8:00 pm |
Finally finished, with everything in the
fermenters. Now we clean up. Luckily Brian has a pressure
washer and we were done by 8:30. |
| 8:30 pm |
Time to have some dinner. Jeff made some awesome
Chicken and Andoui gumbo! We wanted to get a picture of everyone in
the coop, but Bill had to leave for Munich at 6:00. |
