BkR
Junior
This is my first post, so I apologize if this stuff has been asked before. I’ve only ever made fruit wines but a vineyard owner owner I know let me go out and pick about 100 pounds of merlot grapes, I figured it was a good opportunity to try making wine from grapes.
I crushed and destemmed them last weekend, added the sulfite and pectic enzyme, waited 24 hours, and added the yeast. I had 3 fermenting buckets with 3 gallons of must in each. I added a pack of EC-1118 to each bucket and pressed the grapes tonight. I started at 24 brix and used a hydrometer tonight expecting to get around 1.010-1.020, but I got 1.000 after only 5 days. Is this normal? My plan was to rack the wine off the gross lees after about 36 hours and then let it sit in primary for another couple of weeks before stabilizing, degassing, etc. is that still ok to do even though my wine is dry and not putting off much CO2 to protect it from oxygenating? Also, there’s not any activity in my air lock since pressing, is it possible it’ll continue to ferment so I can get down closer to .998?
Hope this makes sense, I appreciate any help, because I’m just thrown off a bit because the hydrometer reading was so low, there’s not much SO2, and doesn’t seem to be any activity in the air lock.
I crushed and destemmed them last weekend, added the sulfite and pectic enzyme, waited 24 hours, and added the yeast. I had 3 fermenting buckets with 3 gallons of must in each. I added a pack of EC-1118 to each bucket and pressed the grapes tonight. I started at 24 brix and used a hydrometer tonight expecting to get around 1.010-1.020, but I got 1.000 after only 5 days. Is this normal? My plan was to rack the wine off the gross lees after about 36 hours and then let it sit in primary for another couple of weeks before stabilizing, degassing, etc. is that still ok to do even though my wine is dry and not putting off much CO2 to protect it from oxygenating? Also, there’s not any activity in my air lock since pressing, is it possible it’ll continue to ferment so I can get down closer to .998?
Hope this makes sense, I appreciate any help, because I’m just thrown off a bit because the hydrometer reading was so low, there’s not much SO2, and doesn’t seem to be any activity in the air lock.