Day 2, Inonculation

Mark down 6:10 pm Monday October 24th as the time that grape juice became wine.

Okay, that might be a little dramatic, but we just added the yeast. I had to move the wine from the garage to my man room. I don't think the back can take much more of that, thus I had to recruit Paty to help move the second big fermentation bin in. She was thrilled to be a part of the process and is looking forward to helping more and more. Here's the fermentation station:

Garbage bags under cardboard protect the carpet from stray drops.

The fermentation station now features a newly acquired space heater to heat the room to the proper fermentation level. Last year I basically heated the entire house via our forced air electric furnace in order to raise the temp in this remote room by 5 degrees. Bad idea.

Earlier today we added more powders to the juice in the form of Peptic Enzyme. This is added to help the skins break down in the must and give the yeast more of the good stuff to chew on as it ferments. We probably should have done this yesterday at the Cellar Homebrew, but we forgot.

One of the most annoying processes of our last two wine experiments was inoculating the dried yeast.  Basically this consisted of adding yeast to some warm water mixed with more powders to make a live culture that we would then add to the wine.  While we did not mess this up, we sure thought we did.  Especially for the Chardonnay.  Not again this year as we discovered liquid yeast:

Ignore the illy can, winemaking involves a lot of Espresso.

These packets have the yeast in a solution inside small bag inside of the main bag, in order to activate the 'Over 70 Million Yeast Cells' and start the yeast going what a person does is smack the bag to burst the inner bag and shake everything up so the solutions mix.

Action Photo.

For the Tempranillo we used one packet of Chateau Red yeast blend. For the Syrah, we used two different yeasts. One bin got two packets of Chateau Red and the other bin received two packets of Bordeaux yeast. Ostensibly the two batches are handled exactly the same, so it will be interesting to taste the difference in the finished product from the yeasts.

All for now, the fermentation should start in 1-3 days.  Part of the privilege of making wine involves punching down the cap every eight hours for a while.  So I will be doing that.  Maybe I can get out the good camera for some good shots that do not involve chronicling this entire process by an old iPhone.