Strongarm wrote:

On Jul 29, 8:30Â*am, "Paul E. Lehmann"
wrote:
Has anyone experimented with cold soaking crushed Chardonnay before
pressing or fermenting Chardonnay a short time on the skins? Â*My goal is
to make a crisp somewhat aromatic Chardonnay without ML or use of oak.

I have quite a bit of Chardonnay on the vine right now and trying to
think of different ways of fermenting for slightly different styles.


My experience has been crisp and aromatic are at the opposite ends of
the spectrum. Short term ferment on the skins will give a very nice,
crisp wine, but it tends to leave out the aromatic qualities you might
be looking for. Short term for me has been 12 to 18 hours on the
skins. Options you might look at would include extending that time.
If you have a lot of grapes and wish to experiment, then allow some to
be over-ripe before you start in enhance the aromatic quality of the
grape. I, myself, will pursue several different kinds of maceration
this year. A word of caution; going for an aromatic wine fragrance
can easily produce flabby wine, so you need to watch your acid levels
very closely.

Tom

Thanks for the information, Tom.
I do not want flabby wine so I may favor crisp over aromatic.

I have read that Chardonnay grapes can loose acid very rapidly on the vine
so I am going to watch them closely. This is my first year growing
Chardonnay. I do not want to do ML on it either or use oak.

What do you think of an overnight cold soak with about 50 ppm SO2 after
crushing and before pressing?

I did this on some Traminette a couple years ago and it turned out
excellent.

The next year I tried it on Pinot Gris and got "Paul's Pink Pinot" which was
just ok and not to my liking. :-(

I was surprised at the amount of color extracted overnight. I will not do
that again on my Pinot Gris. Last years Pinot Gris turned out great (no
soaking overnight).

Paul