Viognier

This past Friday, September 4, 2009 John and I had the pleasure of visiting The Homeplace Vineyard in Chatham, Virginia to pick up some Viognier grapes (http://thehomeplacevineyard.com/). They have a beautiful vineyard planted on an old tobacco field. The Viognier grapes were in great condition.

John and I went down with six 20 gallon food grade containers and left with six full containers and several plastic bags full of whole clusters. We crushed most of the 1/2 ton and sped back up Route 29 with 1000 pounds of must and grapes.

A few hours later, we pulled up to John's house and settled in for a few more hours of pressing. We got about 36 gallons of free run juice and an equivalent of pressed juice. We did not let the juice sit over night to settle and pitched the yeast that night.

Fermentation was wild and completed in about four days! We thought that the fermentations were starting to slow prematurely, but, alas, they were actually done. Checking the sugar level we found out that the wine was just about dry with a gravity very close to 1.

Caught with our pants down -- again -- we hustled to get half of the juice into open carboys. We will bottle our red wine tonight to free up the remainder of our carboys and rack the last two fermenters and limit their exposure to oxygen.

Once settled down into carboys, we are going to transfer the several carboys to a cool location for aging and fining: right now the color -- as you can see below -- is a dirty yellow/green.