Past the peaks

I feel like I can tell through the punch downs tonight that the fermentations have passed their peaks everywhere. The caps were softer and much easier to punch down. They were still thick but just not as hard. The barbera is looking really dark and wonderful. I'm anxious to see how all of these wines turn out. Over the next few days everything should be going pretty dry. I've ordered a bunch more carboys to do the secondary on the barbera although I've heard of people doing MLF during the primary fermentation my protocol is to make sure the wine is completely dry before adding an MLF culture. This year I'm going back to Enoferm Alpha for the secondary. Last year I tried EZMALO ONE from Enartis and it seemed fine but getting it was a little more difficult.

I've got a few more days until I have to worry about such things and I'll extend the maceration on some of them anyway. One trick is to use the seed color as an indicator of when to to press, some like to see the seeds fully saturated with color before pressing. Of course that can take a long time and you risk exposing the wine to too much oxygen during that time if you're not really careful. Since I don't have as much control of Oxygen I'm not likely to extend the maceration too much this year. I'll just have to hope that the cold soak and the other extraction techniques did the trick.

A quick word on why I'm sticking to using all the tools of the trade for these batches. First, since this is my biggest harvest so far and I'm giving back wine in return for the harvest I wanted to add more predictability to the mix, that's why I'm using color extraction enzymes, and yeast nutrients etc. Secondly, since the grapes ripened very unevenly and the brix were low wanted to get as much out of them as possible.

So, in short the wine making I did here doesn't change my feelings about the goodness of low intervention winemaking, but I do believe that to ensure a good result with less intervention you have to be confident in the quality of the fruit and have some historical indicators to guide you. I really had neither for this harvest.