Frank and I made a trip up to VSV to work on the 2017 and 2018 wines and to work on the new landscaping. We started by filtering and bottling the 2017 Cab and Merlot. We wanted to make sure that the wine would not have much sediment so we filtered the wine using first 5micron and then 1.5 micron plate filters and we only pumped out the barrels down to the within 7 inches of the bottom of the barrels. We still got 34 cases of both the Cab and Merlot. This was all stacked into WineCooler 2. We then moved onto the 2018. We racked it from barrel to barrel, but again we pumped to about 5 inches of the bottom. There was more sediment here because the 18 has not been racked as much. It ended up we have 2 full barrels plus 3 gallon carboys for both wines. We added 50ppm of SO2 and put a stave of American Oak cubes in each of the barrels. We decided to leave the 4 empty barrels dry, that means that we need to burn sulfur strips in each and seal them up. Unfortunately Vintners vault was closed so I need to come up SOON to burn the sulfur.
BTW: There may have been some drinking and eating of BBQ’d meat as well.
For entertainment we also went to see the Sensorio Field of Lights. It was quite interesting.