Tuesday, October 12, 2010

2010 Reds, day 4

6:30 AM
Mike over to punch the CalBlend and add FermAid.  15 Brix - less of a drop from last evening than S expected.  Must is 71 F, and coincidentally Mike had dinner last night with someone who's grandfather makes wine and uses heat belts.  For comparison sake, last year using Montrechet yeast and with cellar temps running about 2 to 3 degrees higher (two weeks earlier on the calendar) the must temps of the Merlot blend were between 80 and 82 F.  When it hit 80 F it was at 15 Brix and 24 hours later it was at 5 Brix.  Doesn't seem obvious that we'll have that sort of spike again: let's see.

Primitivo was down to 17.5 Brix, giving off a lot of juice and a lot of big-bubbled froth.  Punching down now feels very satisfying.

1 PM:
CalBlend is up 3 F, and down 3 B in 6.5 hours.  Primitivo up 1 F and down 1 B.  Both are frothy fools.
 [The Primitivo prior to 1 PM punchdown.  Mike was oohing at the size of the bubbles this morning]

8:30 PM:
Mike punches down  CalB, Lori punches down the Primitivo.  Big caps, slight temp rises.  We don't measure sugar (and I regret it a little the next morning).

2 comments:

Bernardo said...

My guess is the yeast etc has slower access to the sugar, guys, since you didn't crush this year. You probably won't see any spikes. Is it generally a longer fermentation process, the uncrushed one?

Steve Lewis said...

Right - no-crush and the slower yeast were decisions we made to go slow and gentle on purpose. Just riding the tiger and counting the ways its stripes are different.