The Crush, Part I: Zinfandel
Sep 13th, 2008 | By Hank Shaw | Category: The Garden, Wine | Comments | 7 Comments |
The annual grape crush is upon me, and for the first time I am making wine with my own grapes — I have four little Zinfandel vines I planted last year, and this season is their inaugural crop.
It is a tentative little crop, only one bucketful. That’s only enough grapes to make 1 gallon of wine this year. When they’re mature, the vines should produce a bucketful each. I might have been able to get maybe another 1/2 gallon from this year’s harvest, but I learned that such small volume defeats my wine press, which is build for larger batches. Without the full pressure of the press (I had to lean on the boards because the ratchet wouldn’t go down far enough), I left a lot of wine in the skins.
Another thing I learned about working with such a small volume is that I could destem all the grapes myself, then hand-crush them all. I left a few uncrushed in the hopes of getting a bit more fruitiness into the finished wine. We’ll see.
I picked the grapes at about 23.5 brix, which should make a wine with roughly 13 percent alcohol — a nice drinker, not a typical Lodi-style Zin Bomb. I had nice acidity levels, too.
I picked at first light, so the grapes would be cool; this slows fermentation a bit. Still, after I pitched the yeast (Lalvin ICV-D254) the initial fermentation finished in only four days, which is pretty fast. I racked it into glass and let the dead yeast and other debris, the gross lees, fall to the bottom for a week. And I had a lot of pretty gross lees, let me tell you.
I decided to put the glass carboy jugs into my salami fridge so they rested at 55 degrees. Oddly, this caused something to precipitate out of the wine and stick to the sides of the jugs. I think it was tartaric acid, but I am not sure.
This morning I racked the new wine off the grape sludge and into clean carboys. This officially starts what’ll be a long clearing process: There was still quite a bit of fine debris — the fine lees — even after I racked it. This is OK, as many vintners let their wines rest on fine lees (the term is sur lees) for up to a year. I’ll give it a couple months, then add some oak.
So, you may be asking, how does my brand-new Zinfandel taste? Pretty rough, I must say. There’s still a ton of sediment in the wine and there was a little hydrogen sulfide blow-off from the gross lees, giving the wine a kind of stinky nose. This will go away. I hope.
But that’s the thing with wine: There are so many variables that if you mess one or two up you will have to repair it somehow — if you can. At any rate, I’m viewing this batch as my dry run for The Crush, Part II, which will be 225 pounds of Mourvedre from El Dorado County. Still, I’m pretty jazzed about making my very own “estate bottled” vintage! Heh. Estate.
And just think — in 2010, we’ll be able to enjoy five whole bottles of it. Woot!
you have a salami fridge?
Why yes genevelyn, yes I do. It’s a jury-rigged set-up I described it a while back when I made Lonzino. I set it at 55 degrees, which is pretty much God’s perfect temperature for aging things…
Kudos for the wine, and for leaving that straight line alone. I couldn’t have done either half as well.
Have you given any thought to leaving some stems in there?
Good stuff! I am curious to learn how it turns out in 2010!
I did leave lots of stems in the must, Peter — I only cut out the main stem on each bunch. Stems = tannins = longevity and heft, so I reckon I need all I can get with a Zin.
did you build your own press or did you buy it? can you share more info about that? I am thinking of a press suitable to press apples for cider, so curious about what others are doing for home-made wines.
Thank you (and congratulation on Le Clos Saint Hank Nouveau)
I bought the press, Sylvie. If I remember right, there is a good brew shop in Fredericksburg, but I bet you can find one closer to you. Never pressed cider, so you’d have to ask them…