Shooting the moon with the Cabernet Sauvignon

I’ve been mulling this over, and just now had a chance to game it out with James as we tasted the Cab: we’re going to shoot the moon.

Okay, so what is this crazy talk? We actually tried this in 2009 with a Cab and it turned out great. You basically let the ferment finish, and the cap fall back into the wine, but then you seal it up for 30-45 days. At the end, you have a totally different wine, and one that’s extremely supple and velvety. If you’ve familiar with Sean Thackery’s wines, he does almost all of his wines this way.

As you might guess, the longer a wine sits in contact with the skins, the more tannin is going to leach out into it. This is accelerated by the fact that, at the end of fermentation, you’ve got the skins soaking in a solvent — 13-14% alcohol.

So usually, the idea is to press before too much tannin — and particularly seed tannin — soaks into the wine. But for some reason, if you let it sit in an airtight container for a good long while, it’ll get more and more tannic until one day — and it really happens that fast, a day or so — the hard, short-chain tannins link up into longer chain tannins. Which is science-talk for velvety, silky loveliness.

But you’ve really got to go for it: once you decide you’re going to commit to collecting all the hearts, you better get all of them or you’re toast.

So obviously, something this insane isn’t without its risks: you’ve got to keep air out of there, no foolin’, for the duration. At the same time, you’ve got to be tasting the wine every couple of days, because once the miracle happens, you’ve got to press right away or it’ll start getting tannic again.

But luckily, as I said, we’ve done this once before so I feel slightly more secure about gambling a ton of cabernet on it. And plus, what could go wrong, am I right? Heh..

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