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The Making of a White Wine with Liquid Yeast
Posted by Ron Goodhew, September 5th, 2011 | 4 Comments
This will be a daily step by step presentation of making one of my favourite whites, an Estate German Mosel Valley Gewurztraminer with Chablis liquid yeast. Rather than using the dry yeast I added the Chablis liquid yeast, after 24 hours the temperature is 70F / 20C. You can see that with the liquid yeast there is a lot more surface activity than usual.
Day 2 - as the yeast continues to ferment the natural sugars in the juice, both alcohol and CO2 are produced. Liquid yeast produces a lot more foam both in the primary and then in the carboy. The temperature is 72F / 22C.
Day 7 - the SG is 1.010 so I have racked the wort into a sanitized carboy
Day 14 - The SG is .995, the temperature is 68F / 20C. I have hit a finishing SG but I need it to continue fermentining for a while - I know this because there is still surface activity.
Day 29 - temperature is 68F / 20C, surface activity continues so I wait.
Day 45 - Sitting on the yeast bed the wine is safe if you go overtime. Today I have added package 2, 3, 4 and then added the F-pack and then stirred. Calgary's altitude locks the CO2 into the wine so now we start degassing. I am working on a degassing system using a vacuum generator attached to an air compressor - more to be announced in the future. You can see the amount of CO2 bubbles released as soon as I created a vacuum. In 3 weeks I will rack off the sediment and bottle when the wine is clear. Never bottle cloudy wine, it will not clear in the bottle.
Day 73 - when I use the Vacuvin there are no CO2 bubbles, the wine is clear so I am racking into a clean carboy leaving the sediment behind.
Day 111 - The German Gewurztraminer is in the middle - crystal clear, ready to filter and then rack back into the carboy for bulk ageing. I will go a maximum of 5 months from the beginning to the end before I bottle. Notice how much darker it is than the Austrian Gruner Veltliner on its left. The wine to the right is a Sicilian Nero D'Avola. Filtered the Gewurtz this week, now just letting it bulk age in the carboy.
Post filed under: Ask The Vintner
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