FrankenWine

It's almost Halloween so it's fitting to talk about the FrankensteinWine in tank right now.

Brix came in under 50 (that's a joke), and the initial sulfur tests came back off the charts. Fun.

So I generally don't like what Laurie Daniels writes about for the local newspaper in her wine column. But today she actually got it right when she said this is a year that winemakers will need to put all their skills to work. Sure it's awesome when we don't have to intervene with the process, but there is always something that needs to be monitored.

This year, we are using all our skills with the FrankenWine (that's what we started calling it). We've added plenty of water hoping to get the sugars balanced, tartaric acid to fix the pH, and copper sulfide to fix the sulfur stink. And let me tell you what, this wine stunk like butt the first two days it was fermenting. We fixed that asap and it's no longer detectable, but I kept having to reassure guests that no, I didn't in fact just fart.

As of today, the wine is inside the winery in tank with the heat lamps on to help push it through the last stages of fermentation, we're at 3.8brix, we should have been at zero by now....we're trying not to freak out, but we are.

Everything else is going along as normal, the year wasn't a total loss but it has had some interesting challenges that's for sure.