Welcome!

Well, here we are at my new blog home!  Hope you like the new look, the most important thing though, is that there are pictures again! Yesterday I spent the day racking the mourvèdre and the press wine. Racking is the process of moving the wine from one tank to another tank and removing the lees, or sediment from the bottom of the first tank, and then putting the wine back again.  We are doing this with the mourvèdre because it has a high volatile acidity, which isn't good.  Volatile acidity can make a wine smell like nail polish remover, which is very bad.  Mourvèdre has a tendancy to have  higher levels of volatile acidity, but  we want to make sure that it doesn't get any higher.  The press wine we racked  because we haven't done it since harvest so there was a pretty good amount of sludge on the bottom of the vat. I took that sludge (or in professional terms "the lees") and added some SO2 to it, mixed it around a bit and put those lees back in with the mourvèdre.  This is a little trick that my friend and wine critic Michel Bettane told me about, he said that if you remove all of the lees from mourvèdre it can dry it out, grenache lees are apparently perfect, so we'll see.  I'm not at all sure what our enologist Mr. Almeras would say about that, and I'm not sure if I'm going to tell him that I did it!

Comments

[joan kling]

Amy, what an interesting blog you have put together. It makes for interesting reading and of course I enjoy the pictures!

LOVE,
Joan