Now that all fermentations are finished, we are moving on to finishing wines and getting some ready for bottling.
We’ve kept our Marquette in two batches in order to assess the differences in wine made from vines that were hedged and those that were not hedged. We hedged and then removed leaves from about half of our Marquette vines in order to open the very vigorous vines up to air circulation and to give the grapes some more sun exposure. We did not hedge the other half of the vines. We hope to taste some differences between the two wines. In both cases, the malic acid has dropped low enough that fermentation is now completely done.
We’ll be cold stabilizing our small batch of Steuben by dropping the temperature of the tank to about 25°F and adding some Cream of Tartar through the top of the tank. The Cream of Tartar will settle to the bottom helping to precipitate out the potassium that is naturally in the wine. This will help prevent the formation tartrate crystals in the wine.
We will also cold stabilize the 2020 Iowa Nouveau.
Our Edelweiss is a bit hazy so we’ll add a fining agent to help remove any protein and to clear it up a bit.
We’ll be racking St. Croix and Frontenac off yeast lees.
Our new boiler will be inspected by the State again late this week and then we plan to fire it up to wash the insides of two new 4,000 gallon outdoor tanks.
