Archive for September, 2005

This morning, I woke up early and thought to myself, “Wine!” Well, that was after I recalled the strange and vivid dream I had while sleeping. After making myself some coffee, going through email, I checked and realized that it was about time to stabilize the batch of Pinot Noir.

I could have done it last week, but that is the nice thing about home winemaking. You don’t have to keep a rigid schedule. Wine doesn’t care if a week or more goes by after when you could have done something. It’s still fine, sitting there.

Stabilization is the stage where the goal is to stop the yeast from reproducing new cells. You aren’t really killing the remaining yeast cells- but are stopping them from producing more, and causing them to be inactive.

I also like to rack the wine at this stage as well, to get it up off the lees. It seems to me that by doing this, it also helps to clear the wine a wee bit faster of live yeast cells that may be in the lees. I may be incorrect though.

What I do is rack the wine into a primary fermenter, and then add sulphite and potassium sorbate. You need these two ingredients together in order to accomplish the task. Then, I stir vigorously.

After the secondary is cleaned up, I rack the wine back into the secondary from the primary fermenter. While this is going on, I added the Isinglass to a half cup of water to let it hydrate. Isinglass is a “fining” agent, which I’ll write more about later. After the wine has been racked into the primary, I add the water and Isinglass and stir vigorously. Or as I did this morning, used my Fizz-X tool to stir.

The carboy then has the airlock replaced, and it goes back up on the counter, to wait as time passes for another couple of weeks while the wine is clearing.

And while it’s doing that, I can blog, work, play, drink other wine, or anything else I please!

There’s some debate over the “best” way to degass wine. Some say using the Fizz-X device is the best, while my own local winestore suggests that simply shaking the carboy vigorously a few times a day for two or three days will work fine.

Some swear by simply stirring vigorously with a spoon. Then there are those that say, correctly of course, that time will take care of degassing.

Time, however, is not on one’s side if one wants to bottle sooner rather than later. There are some batches I have going that I don’t mind waiting for time to take it’s course, but a couple of other batches, I’d like to bottle soon as I have a short window of opportunity to give bottles away as gifts.

I’ve been trying the first three methods – stirring, shaking AND using the Fizz-X device. All of them seem to get some of the CO2 out – but no matter what, the next time I stir, shake or “fizz-x” the batch, there are STILL bubbles appearing and foam created on top.

I’ve been using at least one of the methods each and every day for the past week! And at least 10 times per day. But no matter what, the gas still has not dissipated from the wine.

I’m beginning to wonder if it is really possible to totally degass a new wine completely. I’ll write more on this later, including an examination of the different methods and with some links to the various debates about degassing wine, later over at The Home Winery.