Episode: #4 Pressing!

We took our must home out of the garage and left the cans at the entrance, so that we can rack the free run down the steps. After all the free run was racked out into five gallon carboys, we set up the press and dumped in the skins until the top, and then pressed the remaining juice.
For now, the wine will be sitting on lees, until we can verify that the wine has gone through malolactic.
(Please come back in January, and test with us and learn how to test the wine with chromotography. it will ba fascinating I promise)

Episode: 3 Punchdown + Nutrients

It has been several days. As you will see, we have a healthy fermentation going. But we want to make sure that our yeast cells are nutritiously fed, so we stopped by today, sanitized our puncherdown thingamajig, checked temperature and sugar, and found the sugar to be one third depleted.
We measured out some of our kosher yeast nutrients certified by Rabbi Levy of the OK.
We should be pressing pretty soon, so look out for the next episode.

Episode: 2 Adjusting the PH

This afternoon, we got all the bins ready to send back to the winery, and I came to check the must for 3 things:
1. Temperature to ensure the yeast has the optimal temperature in order for it to start its job.
2. Sugar- Which will be important for us to know throughout the fermentation.
3. PH- Which gives us an indication of the must’s acidity.
After finding the temperature to be slightly too cold, we added heating to the garage. (Hopefully the cold did not hurt the yeast. If you know anything about this, please comment). After calibrating the PH monitor with a standard solution of 4.01, we found the PH levels to be too high indicating very low acidity. Luckily, I was prepared in advance and had my kosher tartaric acid with a hechsher of the Badatz Eidah Hachareidis. As you can see, we measured approximately 2 and a half grams. Later on, I added a bit more acid, which you will not see. We got the PH down to 3.45, which should be much better, both for flavor and the acidity of the wine.
Check out our next episode, where we will hopefully have a healthy fermentation going!

Episode: 1 Picking and Crushing Long Island Merlot Grapes

The following is the narration of the video below:
I set up the garage and sanitized all the equipment. We head out to Eastern Long Island, a 3 hour drive. We finally hear “You have arrived at your destination”. After a short tour of the winery, we head out to the vineyard. After navigating through the vineyards, we finally arrived at a plot of Merlot vines planted in 1997.
As soon as we arrived, the crew at the vineyard removed the bird nets, and we began harvesting. After all the bins were full, the trusty John Deere tractor collected them and we packed all the grapes into a GMC SUV and two Honda Odysseys to their capacity, and we headed back to the winery. At the winery, we obviously paid for our grapes and checked out some more equipment and headed out with our loaded cars back to Brooklyn.
Later that afternoon after arriving to our garage/winery, we crushed our grapes under the supervision of the supervising Rabbis.
The next morning, (although you will not see it on the video- tape was destroyed), I rehydrated the yeast (Kosher for Passover yeast by Lalvin ICVD21) which is a yeast strain which was isolated from one of the best Languedoc terroirs… This yeast is noted for its strong fermentation which will hopefully create a wine with stable color, good tannins and fresh aftertaste.