Depending on how deep your passion is into the world of wine, you may find yourself yearning for further understanding of how wine is transformed from clusters of fruit in a vineyard to a bottle of yummy goodness.  Or not.  As somewhat of a science nerd, you’ve probably read some of my posts about making wine in my basement and the winemaker’s certificate program I am current studying.  Or not.  In my blogging “travels” over the interweb I stumbled across the natural wine movement, which very much intrigues me, and found that my love for wine science and the focus on less human interaction in the winemaking process cross at a point involving the single-celled organisum that is significantly responsible for making wine what it is: Yeast.

To further delve into this intersection, I wrote a piece about yeast and it’s fresh starring role which is published over at the Palate Press, the new online wine magazine.  Check it out!

Cheers!

(no relation of this topic to the title… I just had the Foghat song running through my skull for some reason) 

It’s now Day 5 (Day 3+ of fermentation) and the yeast are really doing their thing.  You can see from the chart below that the temperature has risen quickly to around 75F (23.9 C) and the Brix, or sugar level, has dropped dramatically, down to 6 ( or 1.023 SG).  If it keeps going like this, I may be racking to the carboy this weekend.

All along I have been punching down the cap twice a day to continue extracting color and tannins, though you won’t get much more color extraction past about 3 days.  When we are ready to rack into the carboy, we will siphon the “free-run” out first which is the plain wine juice.  This is generally considered the premium part of the wine and often some winemakers will only use the free-run for their wine.  However, we will also take the rest of the must (or lees) and press the remaining juice out of them to a certain level.  This is generally done in fractions which include differing levels of pressure.  At each fraction, more and more of the phenolics and tannic characters are extracted from the seeds and skins, which can get bitter pretty quick.  So, this means I will taste the resulting juice each time before I decide to add it to the carboy.  Once (or if) I get to a point where the pressed juice is too bitter, I will not add it and it will be tossed.  Since I am doing the pressing by hand, I am not sure I will have much of a problem here.