2022 Zinfandel

Zinfandel has been some of my favorite homemade wines. I did not make one last year, so I wanted to try another one. 

Grapes after crushing

These grapes seemed pretty good. I worked hard at pre-stemming the grapes. Other years I would crush the crapes and then manually remove the stems from the must. This year m wife and I manually removed stems on half, and then used milk-crate as a screen to do the other half. 

Recipe

 144 pound        Zinfandel grapes Valley Beauty/Delta Packing Loci California
6 g                     pectic enzyme    
5 g                    yeast energizer
2 packs            Lalvin EC1118

After one week add:

5.5 T 4007 Malolactic Blend from Wyeastlab

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The density was 1.102 which should make 13.2% alcohol. The refractive index gave 23.5 deg Brix which should make 12.3% alcohol. Not sure why the discrepancy. 

I looked it up in Pambianchi's new book, and both methods gave higher alcohol content of about 13. Maybe the new book's tables are better than his old book.  I decided not to add more sugar. I hope I don't regret that. 

The fermentation started quickly. 

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October 22, 2022: pH = 3.3; TA = 0.7% as tartaric. This is probably fine.  I have no plan to adjust.