Grenache and Plum Wine: Bottling

When last we left our Grenache, back in October, it was sitting in a carboy and slowly clarifying. Over a few months, we monitored its pH and residual sugar content, and once everything had stabilized, we sped up the clarification process by adding bentonite. Oddly, the addition of what is essentially dirt to the wine helps to clarify it, as it assists in precipitating suspended solids.

Our yield ended up being four bottles of rose...

... and about twenty bottles of red.

As you can see, the wine didn't clarify as much as we would have liked it to, but that's not an awful problem. Standing the wine up for a few days before drinking--but not enough to dry out the cork--should promote settling of the solids that remain, and if it remains a problem, decanting or filtering are good options. After we let our tasting sample settle for about an hour, here's what it looked like:

having a nice cherry-red color appropriate to a lighter red wine. Of course, we took the opportunity to taste it, and while it's clearly young (and still a touch gritty!), it's already obvious how this wine might surpass our Carnot Cabernet. The decision not to oak the wine was a good one, as it let the red-fruit strawberry and raspberry flavors through, and it finished with a rich, almost port-like flavor. Tannins are weak, and it will probably be ready to drink delightfully quickly. Until then, our official mascot Gryphy will stand guard over the bottles.

We've also recently bottled our side project, the Strictly Plum-tonic mead and wine. Here's Kierston pouring it from a jug into a pot suitable for settling and siphoning...

...and here's what it looked like.

Finally, here's the mead in its tasting glass, exhibiting a golden color reminiscent of both honey and the plums we used to make the mead.

The Plum-tonic Mead is already wonderfully complex, with a powerful flavor of wildflower that gradually relaxes into a sweet and alcoholic finish, similar to a fortified wine.