Firstly, allergies in Napa are at an all time high. Napa is traditionally horrendous for allergy sufferers but this season even non allergy sufferers are miserable. Myself included. This is mustard growing between the vines, I don't know if that's whats causing my allergies, but it illustrates Napa's fecundity. Everything is in full bloom and it has been very windy. And did I mention miserable?
This installment of the
Fining Chronicles covers Egg White Fining. We separate the yokes from the egg whites. The yokes are discarded and the whites are added to the wine. This picture was from a barrel fining where the eggs white of two eggs were added directly to each barrel.
This is a video of Yeast Nutrient Additions to white wine barrels (Sauvignon blanc) but the egg whites are added in the same way to barrels for fining. This was taken around October during Harvest, but it still helps illustrate the point.
This time around, we are fining two tanks that total over 12,2000 gallons, instead of a 60 gallon barrel. So we needed a lot more eggs. We are doing this in May so that the wine (vintage 2009) will have about 6 weeks to settle before it is bottled in July.
Here I am cracking the eggs and separating the whites from the yokes. The whites go into the bucket to be slowly introduced into a stainless steel tank. We take about 30 minutes to introduce about a gallon of egg whites to a tank. If you add them too quickly they clump up and you get poor distribution.
For 12,200gallons we cracked about 150 eggs. We slowly mix in the egg whites into the tanks and then let the egg protein bind the wine proteins and as the molecules attract each other they become larger, less soluble and therefore sink to the bottom of the tank. However this process tankes time, the amount of time varies but in this case, the wine will have at least 6 weeks to settle before it is racked off the solids and bottled.
May in Napa means allergies, fining and preparing for bottling.
-L
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