Our Wine is Fine!

By fine, I don't mean finely rated. But we are happy -- in fact quite pleased, with their progression. Just before Christmas, we had family in town and decided to give it a taste.

I had been worried about the Chardonnay, which looks pretty brown in the eight gallon jug where it's currently aging. Not only does it have a nice straw yellow color once removed from the jug, it's tasting like very young Chardonnay -- citrusy and quite acidic. By the next racking in early 2009, it should be looking a lot less like apple juice and more like the wine it's becoming.

The Pinot has been sitting quietly since we last racked. Given my foot treading before pressing, the color is quite dark. It's thrown quite a bit of sediment and tastes just dandy -- lots of cranberry, bright cherry and zippy acidity.

Mind you, neither are drinkable right now. We're just happy to see that there are no discernable flaws... at least not yet. This coming year I'll be taking two courses, introductions to viticulture and enology, which should help for harvest 2009.

Saved from the Freeze... Nature's Cold Stabilization

As of tonight I have new office mates: our Chardonnay and Pinot Noir. The temperatures are dropping below freezing this weekend, so we had to bring our "children" in from the garage. (Wine popsicles aren't part of our production "plan", at least not this year.)

Both seem to smell pretty normal. I know I should be fretting over them right now, doing testing and taking samples, but between managing new and current clients, finishing a school quarter, preparing to teach and learn during another and getting ready for a trip and visitors shortly thereafter, our vinous babes are fairly low on my list. Add these challenges to the fact that I at most view this as a fun chemistry experiment and I think I've come up with a pretty good set of excuses for our neglect!

The good news about the wines' few weeks spent in dark isolation in the garage crawl space is that they've benefited from "low impact production" and been cold stabilized by "nature's decreasing temperatures". The carbon footprint is so far very low so I feel really good about that.

Patrick asked me today about re-racking and I let him know that it's on my calendar for early 2009 -- thank goodness for Outlook.