You’ve seen your custom wine through crush and fermentation, what comes next?
The almost frantic activities of harvest, crush, and fermentation have past, so what comes next? The wine is resting in barrel but not quite ready to settle in for winter. The activity slows down drastically now that the wine is in barrel but there are still things happening to the young wine. The final few grams of sugar, if any sugar remains, are being consumed by the remaining yeast culture. And for all red wines, and many white wines, the conversion of malic acid to lactic acid by the introduction of a malic culture is underway.
Read on to find out more on how to make wine and what happens after malolactic fermentation is through.
Monitoring/ Inducing Malolactic Fermentation and Keeping Track of Other Changes
Once your wine is put into barrels, it is left to rest for a while so that it finishes the last stage of its fermentation. During this process, as well as later on, when your custom wine stops fermenting and finally begins to age, winemakers will keep you posted on all the relevant changes that occur inside the barrel, including brix and temperature levels, and malo – the conversion of malic acid to lactic acid. Here is Crushpad Chief Winemaker Michael Zitzlaff with more details:
“[...] Every couple of weeks we monitor the amount of malic acid you have in your wine. The conversion of malic to lactic occurs in one of two ways – Either it’s native, where the native bacteria in the wine are starting to get going and will actually convert that malic to lactic, or we inoculate it with malic bacteria, which is a freeze-dried culture that we use (at Crushpad).”
According to Zitzlaff, the ideal scenario is when the values for sugar and malic come to zero at just about the same time. At that stage, winemakers can begin adjusting the amount of sulfur inside the barrel, typically by using 2-gram sulfur tablets, which, as Zitzlaff points out, “are a very safe and simple way to add sulfur to the wine”.
Racking the Wine, Settling it for Winter and Making Additional Measurements
About two to four weeks down the track, winemakers can proceed to racking the wine, which involves extracting the clean wine from the barrel, cleaning the barrel from any dead yeast cells, residual bacteria formations and any other impurities, and then returning the wine back to that barrel. From there, once winemakers adjust the sulfur one more time, your custom wine is ready to overwinter, as it goes to bed until January – February.
Between fermentation and settling the wine for winter, winemakers continue with a series of important measurements. Although not as regularly as before, during this time they will still need to monitor the residual sugar and the malic acid left inside the barrels, keeping clients posted on any eventual changes. In addition to that, clients will receive a racking notification, and once the racking, the topping, and the sulfuring have been done, they will also receive samples of all their new wines – usually around the month of February.