Time to punch the cap

As of Wednesday morning our cap was officially forming.  The cap is basically the berries floating to the top of the must.  They then start to get hard and prevent air from reaching the fermenting wine.  That would be bad.  So what you do is you punch down the cap every eight hours.

So at 8 am, 4 pm and Midnight I punch down the cap and in the process stir the must so the small particles (called the lees) that settle out in the last eight hours are mixed back into the fermenting wine.  Every little bit of nutrients for the yeast to work on is good.  Thus I give it a very vigorous stir using an industrial sized stainless steel potato masher.

On Tuesday I added some more powder to the wine.  This time it was a powder called Fermaid K.  It is a yeast nutrient that helps the yeast foster a fast and efficient growth.  This powder almost looks like clay.  To add it to the must, I took a wine glass and filled it up with juice from each of the fermenting containers.  Then I mixed the proper amount of Fermain into the wine glass, swirled it all around so it disolved and then poured it back into the must during the cap punch-down process.  Pretty easy process.

The house and especially the basement smell very much like a winery right now.  Paty is thrilled with this process as you can imagine.  So I am assuming that all these fragrances mean the fermentation is taking off.

All this talk about wine and yeasts and inoculations you would think that yeast would be front of my mind.  In a non wine anecdote, I made homemade pizzas tonight for dinner.  Lately I have been using the bread maker to make the dough from scratch.  I like the consistency I can get with the dough when I am in charge of the ingredients.  Plus I can add anything I want to the dough; Oregano, Garlic Powder, Fresh Basil, anything.  Well let me tell you that if you use the bread maker to make pizza dough and you forget to add the yeast, it doesn't work out that well.  I realized that I forgot the yeast as I was adding pizza #2 to the oven.  By that time I was committed.  And while it looked like pizza, the dough was not good.  Very flat.  Morale of the story, you can make pizza dough without yeast but it will be bad.  And no, the dough did not pick up any random wild stains of natural yeast like would have happened if we did the same thing for the wine.