We picked the Aurelia at 6:30a.m.. Considering I was up until 2 a.m. watching the meteor shower and trying to put a dent in my cellar with Blair and Danny Carey, I should receive a Silver Star. I was quite the wounded Vino Soldier when the alarm went off at 5 :30a.m.. But no sacrifice is too great when a decent blog is in the making.
There are only 7 Aurelia vines at the moment. We’re using the plant material to propagate, but we don’t want to go too far until we know what this juice is all about. For those showing up late to the party, please refer to our earlier journal entries, dated 08/23-2005, and 04/23/2006, for details.
Since all we have is 7 vines, we only had about Three 5 gallon buckets to work with. That translates to about 3.5 gallons of juice. And since the amount is so low, I had to hand de-stem and hand crush the whole batch. Then we put the skins into a Duck Press to get what we could out of the remaining must. Very analog.
It’s coming along well. the pH initially came in high, but it’s because our ghetto pH meter needed to be calibrated. Once we did that, it was 3.55. We did an acid adjustment and it dropped to 3.33. All good so far. We’ll keep you posted.