MLF.

Whilst I have been busy of late with activities that have frequently taken me away from Vinoland, Vinomaker has been hard at work down in Vinoland's cellar.  He has been filling his spare time with the fining and cold-stabilisation of the white wines he made last autumn and he has also been testing the red wines to see if they have completed malolactic fermentation (MLF).  MLF is over when all of the malic acid in the wine has been converted to lactic acid with the aid of malolactic bacteria.
The easiest way to assess whether or not MLF is complete is to perform a paper chromatography (PC) test.  PC is a relatively simple test which is done by placing tiny drops of wine, (and control samples of tartaric, malic and lactic acids), onto chromotography paper which is then placed in an eluting solution. The solute, which is rather smelly, wicks up through the paper separating out the acids from the wine samples by virtue of their differing molecular weights.  Each acid will move a characteristic distance up the chromatography paper thus making it fairly easy to identify the presence one of the aforementioned acids.
One could, of course, send samples of wine to a laboratory which specialises in these types of things for an enzymatic assay.  But where's the fun in that?  This is winemaking and having physical evidence of a small natural wonder, albeit in the form of a tie-dyed piece of blotting paper,  is one of the more entertaining aspects of turning grape juice into wine.

Bottle it up!

At last, all viticulture and wine making operations for 2008, are at an end for Vinomaker and me. That is except for topping barrels and general housekeeping in the cellar. I won't have to be out in the vineyard, pruning, until February or March and all the 2008 wine is snoozing in barrels (or still going through malolactic fermentation).
Today we bottled our remaining 2006 Cabernet sauvignon and Syrah. It's a little later in the year than we intended but we had moved it into neutral barrels so it hadn't picked up any additional oak. It all tastes rather nice...we are both pleased with how the 2006 vintage turned out. Now we just have to wait until it settles down from bottle-shock before we can imbibe. Can't you hear me tapping my fingers?