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Ended up racking the 2018 Lodi Zin and Chilean Carmenere/Petit Verdot out of their barrels and moved the CA Cab and Petit Sirah into the barrels. Winery is cleaned up and just about ready. Bring it on!
 
Going to spend some time in the wine room getting ready for the Cab Syrah field blend, too.

About how many gallons is 6 lugs of grapes? Thinking on whether I sanitize the medium or large fermentor.

You'll have about 12 gallons when you're all done. It won't fit in a 20gal Brute, that's for certain.
 
I have 15 gallons of H3 Syrah from grapes from the 2017 vintage in bulk aging. I decided to bottle 6 gallons today. :db

This was a fairly massive wine, with very deep purple coloring. The wine is lovely, IMHO, but is still a bit bitter from the tannins. I think I'll let the other 9 gallons age in bulk another year, but even the "young" bottled wine is drinking nicely with a little decanting. Maybe I will just tell people it is Negroamaro ;)
 
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Going to spend some time in the wine room getting ready for the Cab Syrah field blend, too.

About how many gallons is 6 lugs of grapes? Thinking on whether I sanitize the medium or large fermentor.

Yesterday I crushed 150 lbs and it filled 3 six gallon buckets to the 5+ gallon mark. The math shows 21.6 gallons for your 6 lugs with no allowance for the cap.
 
A couple of photos the wife took yesterday as my brother in law and I pressed off the 200+ lbs of St. Vincent grapes and some of the 500+ Chambourcin grapes we picked up to make roses. I could have increased the pH of the Chambourcin that will become red wine a small bit. It is at 3.3, ta about 0.7 so I decided to go with it as is. The St. Vincent was a little low as well at 3.1, but for a rose, I thought both of those should be pretty good. Yeast was pitched for the red wine party yesterday as a cap was almost starting to form from the native yeast. Sg level was perfect on the Chambourcin at 24.5 Brix. I am adding a little bit of chapitalization sugar to the St. Vincent, Brix were at 19.5. 1890439475.jpeg312322017.jpeg
 
@sour_grapes
I'm looking at this kit with skins as well as the Stag's Leap Merlot with skins. How did this one turn out?

Well, that was nearly 6 years ago, so please forgive my questionable memory! ;) I drank the last one less than a year ago, however, so I am not totally out of it.

It was decent. Not the best, not the worst I have made. A pleasant quaff. I also made the CC Showcase Malbec, which is really nice, one of my favorite results to date. Although I never did a back-to-back Malbec tasting between these two, the CC Showcase was hands-down better.

I have also done the WE Eclipse Stag's Leap Merlot. It is also hands-down better than the WE SI Malbec.

It is probably fair to note that my winemaking may have improved between the time I made the WE SI Malbec and the others. In particular, I started adding fermentation and/or finishing tannins, which I am convinced help out a lot.
 
Well, that was nearly 6 years ago, so please forgive my questionable memory! ;) I drank the last one less than a year ago, however, so I am not totally out of it.

It was decent. Not the best, not the worst I have made. A pleasant quaff. I also made the CC Showcase Malbec, which is really nice, one of my favorite results to date. Although I never did a back-to-back Malbec tasting between these two, the CC Showcase was hands-down better.

I have also done the WE Eclipse Stag's Leap Merlot. It is also hands-down better than the WE SI Malbec.

It is probably fair to note that my winemaking may have improved between the time I made the WE SI Malbec and the others. In particular, I started adding fermentation and/or finishing tannins, which I am convinced help out a lot.
Unfortunately I can only get WE kits here, so CC isn’t an option. I have seen people rave on here about the SL Merlot so I definitely want to get that but haven’t seen as much info about the Argentinian Malbec. If it’s just ok I’ll skip it... its just that both are on sale and I was wondering if it’s worth the carboy space. Maybe I’ll just keep hoping that the Eclipse Forza goes on sale at some point. :)

As for staying on topic... today I racked my Luna Bianca to carboy for sur lie/batonnage, racked my LE Barbaresco off the skins to a carboy with extra oak after an 8 week EM, and did a chocolate raspberry dragon blood (chocolate from cacao husk tea and toasted nibs... smells amazing) as well as a blueberry/blackberry/black currant dragon blood (black-and-blueblood, a proven winner - this is batch #2).
 
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3 lugs would not fit in my 10 gallon Brute. I'm guessing you would need a 30 gallon Brute.

Yeah, that's a little tight. I usually figure that 3 lugs of grapes (36# lugs) produce 10 gallons of must and yield 6 - 7 gallons of finished wine. 10 gallons of must in a 10 gallon bucket won't leave enough room for the cap to rise, I try to allow about 20% space on top of the must for the cap.
 
Racked the 90L of muscat today. I'm now officially out of carboys, will pick up a few more tomorrow as my Dornfelder is down to 1.007 as well.
I have 11 cases of empty bottles ready to go, just need to find some time for a bottling day, 3 or 4 different wines to bottle.
Man i love that all-in-one wine pump, sure made racking out of the 32gal brute a lot easier.
 

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