Pressed the zin
I got to the wine room at 5:45 AM, hoping to get head start on the zin pressing. I was able to setup and clean all the equipment, and actually start pressing by the time Esteban showed up at 7AM. Then Shahrokh and a friend Ali showed up. Three people are optimum given my equipment; a fourth person allows breaks!
The stats:
- Pressed off at 1.5 brix sugar
- We pressed into the white food grade tubs, just like the syrah.
- It required 4 press runs, with the 4th needing some pomace from the previous run to fill the press.
- We did a final pomace only hard press, and got maybe 3 or 4 more gallons. It actually tasted pretty good, but we will keep it separate.
- 91.9 gallons of wine + gross lees.
- Free run: 60.9 gallons = 8.9+15.1+15.1+21.8
- Medium press run: 16.4 G
- Hard press: 14.6 G
- The nose on the wine was very good, with occasional whiffs of H2S. It really smelled like zin in the room. Everyone liked the taste, even at this early stage.
- Finished by 9:30 AM.
- We plan on racking into the demijohns, and transporting to the cellar, to go into a 60 gallon French Oak ReCoop barrel on Tuesday morning. There is enough free run to fill the barrel I think, so the press run will go into glass or a second barrel. We’ll see how much we have Tuesday.