Step 1 before bottling wine : Blending
This is the second busiest time of year in the cellar. The first being harvest, receiving and fermenting all the fruit. Now it's time to finish all those wines to get them into bottle. Follow along as I take you through some of the cellar processes to get the raw wines into bottle.
1st off, understanding how I personally prefer to make wine is a bit of the process. I approach wine making as a puzzle, all the pieces are needed to create the final picture, but one piece alone, even two, doesn't really get you what you want.
So in the fall, I make those individual pieces that I can blend and put together to create what I want to drink. Experience (trial and error too) has helped me focus on what kind of pieces I want to produce in the first place.
Deciding how ripe I want the fruit and picking a harvest date, how I'll press the fruit, skin contact or not are some of these decisions. Than what yeast strain (if any), what fermentation vessel, lees stirring; all these are factors that will effect the final product or piece if you will.
Fast forward 6 monthes, all those decisions are in the forefront of my tasting as I get ready to bottle in the next month. Now its time for blending
Start by pulling out little bottles of all the vessels/batches. I create small sample sized different blends, around a 100ml. Lots of precise measuring and percentages calculated. Cylinders and bottles, pouring and spilling. Usually a mess ensues. Mixing everything 7 times to blend the different densities. I than taste them immediately, then let them sit for a few hours. Taste again. Always standardizing the way one tastes is important, remove the bias. Smell, swirl, smell again. Sip one. Spit. Sip two - hold. Spit.
I select the letters I like, and try the same blends in week or so. Just to make sure I'm happy with it before blending the final larger batch of wine.
Cheers!
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