Very, very excited about making a Chardonnay this year! We decided on a 10/4 (pre-rain!) pick date this year and the numbers look very auspicious for the Chablis style I'm gunning for: 22.6 brix, 8 TA, 3.4 pH. I de-stemmed and mashed the fruit up pretty good, then let it sit on the skins for almost 12 hours before pressing, primarily in the hopes of creating a rounder mouth-feel.
This contact will be all the tanins this wine sees. I pressed into a cold settling tank, then racked it into stainless where I'm doing a slow cool (10-15 degrees) ferment. Last week things were still very sweet, green apples (high malic acids) shifting into bananas (terpenes); maybe about a tenth into the ferment, I didn't do a brix.
Very, very excited about making a Chardonnay this year! We decided on a 10/4 (pre-rain!) pick date this year and the numbers look very auspicious for the Chablis style I'm gunning for: 22.6 brix, 8 TA, 3.4 pH. I de-stemmed and mashed the fruit up pretty good, then let it sit on the skins for almost 12 hours before pressing, primarily in the hopes of creating a rounder mouth-feel. 
This contact will be all the tanins this wine sees. I pressed into a cold settling tank, then racked it into stainless where I'm doing a slow cool (10-15 degrees) ferment. Last week things were still very sweet, green apples (high malic acids) shifting into bananas (terpenes); maybe about a tenth into the ferment, I didn't do a brix.
