We will get the preventative maintenance done on our scales and our presses early this week and then get our outside 4,000 gallon tanks washed. We will stock up our case goods room so that we can continue to make deliveries to retailers during harvest without having to run after more wine. And, we will continue sampling grapes and testing them.
One bit of testing we can’t do internally is to determine how much YAN (yeast assimilable Nitrogen) our grapes have. They naturally produce YAN that is consumed by the yeast while converting the juice to wine. We will also add Nitrogen during fermentation as we want to be sure each batch of wine has enough Nitrogen, but not too much. So, we measure how much YAN the juice starts with and adjust our mid-fermentation Nitrogen addition accordingly. To get the YAN testing done, we send juice samples up to Iowa State University where the staff at the Midwest Grape and Wine Industry Institute do the testing for us.
