New member - Making mistakes & learning along the way.

[Isaia]

I'm making my 3rd batch of Bello California Cabernet Sauvignon from juice, 18 gallons. I started it on 9/8/22.

 

[BernardSmith]

Hi Isaia - and welcome. Wine typically has no non-fermentable sugars so talk of "attenuation" really has no meaning. Wine making is similar to brewing but they are not the same thing. If you started with the juice of wine grapes your final gravity ought to be 1.000 or lower (alcohol is less dense than water so any solution of "water" and alcohol will by definition be lower than 1.000) . What yeast did you "pitch" (add)? at what temperature was your must (the juice)? The room?
Technically, gravity is a measure of the density of the liquid compared to water; brix is a measure of the concentration of the juice (or wine) assuming that what you are measuring is the sugar content: brix is a metric that is about 1/4 of the metric of density; so a gravity of about 1.100 (a potential alcohol by volume (ABV) of about 13%) will have a brix of about 23. Your brix of about 23. 7 would have a potential ABV of more than twice your ABV... so something you are doing is not working... And after a month (today being 10/13/22) I would have expected all the sugars in the juice to have fermented brut dry...

 

[Isaia]

LOL, my mistake. I started fermentation on 10/8/22. Fermentation is going strong, and I added 18g of Fermaid K last night. The current fermentation temperature is 77F. 18 Grams of Go-Ferm & 15 grams of EC-1118 LALVIN Yeast.

 

[BernardSmith]

Aha... now it makes better sense... but again, just to be clear brewers talk about attenuation. We assume wine yeasts ferment 100 percent 100 percent of the time.