Outside 62 F, not raining (that's the best that can be said), breezy and less humid than the last couple of days.Cellar: 75 F.
Sauv. Blanc: 80 F, 14.5 Brix, thick but regular foam (1.5 inches), sizzling but no great bubbling. Airlock still. How many solid particles there are in the must is pretty notable. With about 40% of the sugar seeming to be converted at this point, it looks likely that there aren't going to be any fermentation fireworks - no dancing bubblers or overflowing foam. Just steady working yeast. Need to go back and look again at what I thought was the rise between the evening of day 3 and the morning of day 4. Safest to say that the evening day 3 reading was bad.
Syrah: 80 F, 9 Brix. Woot! Punch is ever softer. It only takes minutes for the cap to reestablish itself (thinly). Color is really extraordinary. Compared to the SB must the Syrah must is particle free and still.
Sidenote: Jim & Erin took a little tour of the cellar last night at around 10:30. Erin punched down the red.
(Video is of SJL's punch down in the AM, not Erin's 11 PM punchdown)
18:00
Cellar 75 F, outside 68 F and 78% humidity.
Sauv. Blanc: 79.5 F, 10.5 Brix. Stately shag. No great delta in behavior but a +35% drop in sugar since this morning.
Syrah: 80 F*, 5 Brix. Lovely. Cap is, what, 4 or 5 inches? Might switch to the short scale hydrometer in the morning, or maybe wait until the long scale is closer to zero. Either way: it's time to decide whether to encourage malo, discourage it, or just let the wine do what it wants to do.
Here's the *. I've been testing the temperature of the juice with a standard beer / wine thermometer, about a foot long, with a scale from freezing to boiling. Inserted into either the white juice or through the cap of the red, it's down in the heart of the thing and getting a good internal temperature reading. This evening I also used a digital thermometer, only inserting it a few inches. In the white, I got the same temperature reading with both thermometers. With the red, where the digital was either at the bottom of the cap or maybe just through it into the juice, the reading was 84 F rather than 80. Hot stuff rises. Air gets trapped in baby's tummy. Wah!
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