Saturday Chardonnay Filtration

Saturday morning we arrived at the winery before 10 AM. We had a busy day planned with final preparation of the Chardonnay for bottling. First up was to remove all the extra insulation from the tank holding the Chardonnay.

Then we had to hook up the filter. No small task, it’s only the second time we’ve used it. Stef had pretty good notes from last year but it still took us 90 minutes or so to get everything hooked up. We also decided to do a final racking so instead of filtering through the bottom bottling valve we finished off the tank with a racking wand.

The wine this year has a small amount of residual sugar so we wanted to get a good filtration on the wine to prevent any problems after bottling. The picture below is the filter all hooked up and working away.


We had one set back that we thought was major, but turned out to be minor. At some point in the last year the filter had been bumped and a pressure valve was turned sideways. We didn’t notice the valve was out of position and when we started to tighten down the filter, the valve popped right off. We thought we were stuck, but we were able to route around the broken valve.


I’m glad we did the final racking the tank had a fair amount of lees left. We had guests at 2PM so mostly stopped for the day and did some tasting and had snacks. Stefania cleaned up the tanks around entertaining and we were packed up and on our way home by 6:30