Vin De Glaciere 2007

This week we started our Vin De Glaciere winemaking. It is a very fun wine to make even though it is quite excruciating. The basic idea behind the making of this nectar is to press frozen grapes, leaving the water iced (in the form of a suburban size ice cube) in the press and releasing only the sugar. The juice coming out of the press is very sweet (about 36 Brix). We will ferment it to about 9% alcohol leaving about 16% of Residual Sugar. We freeze the grapes from a single vineyard in the Yakima Valley in a big freezer and we usually press about 10 tons a day which will be made into 350 cases. It is a long process that will take an entire month. After the pressing we have to ferment the ultra sweet juice which also requires some efforts because yeasts do not thrive in such a high sugar environment. It will probably take another month to ferment and will cause a few dozen cardiac arrest to the winemaking team worrying about the yeast finishing their job. At the end we make a very crisp and focused single vineyard Riesling dessert wine that is just plain delicious.

This entry was posted on Monday, November 19th, 2007 at 11:09 am and is filed under About Our Wines, Harvest. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.