Well we crushed and thanks to all involved it went even better than planned. To tell you the truth I was sweating it pretty badly leading up to Saturday. I got notification that the grapes were being picked for Friday early in the week. So I rallied the troops for a Saturday crush.
Rachel and Mike saved the day with the pickup and trailer helping me get the grapes from Napa Cellars at 9:30 this morning. We setup, sterilized all of the equipment and got going on the crush at about 10:30. Ross joined in and we began the saignee of the rose first. The Syrah was imparting a lot of color, but we continued on.
Then arrived Rick Vega, his wife ( a “Luxury” enologist at Beringer up the street), Erika and Olivia. At this point I sat back, picked up the pizzas and let the crew crank away.
As lunch was on, Malcolm, Natalie, and Paul all showed up with some extra beer (wine makers drink beer during the wine making process, however we downed a few bottles of wine as well after the clean up).
So where do we stand? The free run was hitting about 25 brix (about 14.5% potential alc). The rose has been inoculated with VL3 and is going in an ice bath. Rick’s wife promised me that a lot of the color will fall out during fermentation. So if it doesn’t its all on her 
. I will check in tomorrow with rose brix readings, and a report on the red inoculation.
