To celebrate the new year (and fit in one last hurrah for our holiday break) The Wife and I made the short drive over to Dry Comal Creek winery on Sunday. There was a surprising number of people there for a Sunday afternoon, and they'd expanded considerably since we were last there several years ago. The Wife kept ogling one customer there, who was walking around with a Canon 5D II and EF 24-70 2.8 L held very conspicuously. This guy was there with some friends who were taking photos with Canon Rebels and point-and-shoots, but we never once saw this fellow take a single shot. Yet he walked around with it held like he was about to start firing away. A poseur? Maybe. The Wife still wanted his lens.
We each had a full tasting, and I generally liked their whites better than their reds, although I normally prefer red wines. The exception was their $30 Spanish Black, which has an unusual, intriguing flavor for a red. Another fun wine was their Frizzante Rose, which was essentially their popular White Spanish Black which had undergone an unexpected bottle fermentation. This dried out the normally semi-dry wine considerably and made it very light and fruity. We eventually came away with a case of 2008 Savignon Blanc (at a steep discount!) along with assorted odds and ends. Suffice to say, our wine racks at home are brimming over.
Upon our return home, I turned my sights toward the 5 gallons of plum wine I've had fermenting since early December. For those of you keeping score at home, my last attempt at plum wine didn't go so well. This time, however, I was determined not to let the stuff oxidize. The wine needed to be racked off the old, spent fruit, so I devised a clever plan in which I'd drain the wine into one of my 6-gallon fermenting buckets, then back into the original 6-gallon fermenter once I'd cleaned it out (it was in one of the buckets, you see, that my last attempt oxidized in. So I wasn't taking any chances). Alas, such a well-laid plan had no hope of succeeding. My fermenter has a bung spigot, and when I rack or bottle mead and beer, this works great. However, with the plum wine, the spigot clogged in about 1.3 seconds. Hrm. Okay, I've got a racking cane designed specifically for racking wine. And this fool-proof design proved its worth by lasting 8.6 seconds before it too was clogged. I cleaned it out. The next go lasted 5.2 seconds. After much futile struggle (all the while acutely aware of the nasty atmospheric oxygen coming into contact with my virgin wine) I gave up. Brute force was my only option.
I got a colander and laid cheesecloth in it. Then I poured the wine through it, into the bucket. Not great for preventing oxidation, I know, but what choice did I have? I ultimately had to break it down into four pours, as the cloth would quickly become fully clogged with decomposed, fermented plum matter. Then I cleaned out the original fermenter and into I added roughly a quarter pound of sugar and a couple teaspoons of yeast energizer before returning the wine to the container (this time, thankfully, the bung spigot and hose from the bucket worked fine, with no clogs!). My concern for oxidation is such that I wanted to spur another, secondary fermentation to force out all the oxygen from the vessel and wine, replacing it with a shield of protective carbon dioxide. I hadn't seen any activity in the airlock for several weeks, and worried that the original Lavin 71B-1122 yeast had gone dormant (tasting the proto-wine revealed an alcoholic and pleasantly fruity taste, but more residual sweetness than should be present after a month of fermenting). So for insurance, I took a straw and siphoned up some active yeast from the sediment of my apfelwein. This second yeast introduced is Montrachet, a versatile yeast good for fruits with a high alcohol tolerance. It won't be able to out-compete any of the 71B still active, but it will ensure the wine ferments dry and drives out the oxygen.
Horror of horrors, thought, once I closed the vessel back up and installed the airlock, I saw no activity. None. Wait, that's not right. At this stage of a wine's fermentation, it's not unusual to see little activity, even with added sugar. What I saw was the opposite. The vodka-filled airlock (normally I use water, but because of the disaster last time, I chose to use vodka this time. Bacteria and other things that do bad things to wine can't live in vodka, and again, I'm taking no chances), when I pressed the sides of the vessel, bubbled and the fluid level changed due to the change in pressure. But as I watched, it slowly returned to equilibrium. Which is good, if yeast is producing CO2, this is what you want. But once it reached equilibrium, it stopped. No positive pressure came from inside the container. Which meant I had an air leak--the seal wasn't good. I wrestled with that thing for an hour, and slowed it, but didn't stop it. This meant that my wine would continue to be vulnerable to oxygen! Finally, desperate, I took a second 6-inch circular gasket from my 1.5 gallon fermenter and layered it inside the lid, doubling the gaskets, then screwing that down. Guess what? That did the trick. Positive pressure built up, and the air lock began to bubble. Yay! Let's see if we can maintain that airlock integrity for another couple of months, and (fingers crossed) the wine clears enough for bottling without another racking.
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