Filter this

Last week at HJW we started filtering! This was very exciting. Filtering is one of the last steps before bottling. Essentially, in the simplest terms, the winemaking process goes like this: pick the grapes, press the juice, rack (transfer) the juice off the solids, ferment the grape juice (thereby converting the sugar to alcohol by action of yeast), rack off the fermentation lees and tartrates, cold stabilize (lower the temperature of the tank to about 35 degrees F) to further precipitate out any tartrates, filter, blend and bottle. So filtering is a big step. We use a very fine (0.2 micron) cross-flow filter:

We started on Wednesday and in 3 days we filtered the components of Frost Cuvee (our white blend), a couple of tanks of Riesling, and Gewurztraminer. We still have a lot of tanks to go, but it's very exciting because once the wine is filtered we will make final blending decisions and then bottle it.