Thursday, November 15, 2007

Filtering The Wine: Keeping Out Mice Tails At The Expense of Taste?

We're one week away from bottling a vintage that we feel is good enough to sell for $20 bottle, or more, and some interesting questions have come up.

What is the best way for us to [economically] filter the wine?

If we filter too agressively, with the flavor be stripped out?

What I know is this ... the other week we opened one of the last bottles of our first vintage, the 2004 Syrah. It tasted good, and age was treating the contents very, very well. But in the middle of my glass, was a piece of sediment, swimming around. And I vowed that I would filter when bottling this year.

The enomatic device we use for bottling has an optional filter available. Mike from neighboring Sunrise Vineyards has this filter, and I've asked him if I could borrow it, but he warned me saying the last time he used it, it did a fine job keeping the mice tails out, but stripped the flavor.

So, gentle reader, and those of you with more experience than us, what would you recommend for filtering?

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