The shoe and the collar
Three photos to help describe where the wine is at.Relatively still, occasional bits raising to the surface. Bubblers are no longer steady.
You can see that as we moved toward the bottom of the primary fermenter the must that was coming out had increasingly more grape solids and dead yeast. This isn't exact, but CB1 has about two inches of lees drifted along its bottom edge, and CB4 has about three inches of lees along the edge. (It's unlikely that these are the depths of the lees all the way across - the walls at the edge catch more, really like drifts.) CB5 also known now as the dregs, isn't pictured: a small dog would disappear in its lees.
The collar on CB3 is representative of the rest. Very thin line of bubbles. Lots of schmutz up by the stopper from when the must was very active and still fouling the bubblers. There's more headspace than we usually like. I'll clean all the necks to make sure nothing bad grows there and bothers the must. I can either add some sterilized glass marbles to eliminate the headspace or just relax.
 |
| Lees in CB4 |
 |
| Lees in CB1 |
 |
| Collar of CB3 |
