US Oh Little Big Mouth, you so tiny! Shmutz around the jug is yeast residue.
One of the cool things about the Master Vintner Small Batch kit is the size. Compared to lugging 6 US-gallon (23 litre) carboys around, the Little Big Mouth fermenter is a breeze. I’m a big, strong brute, but even I get twinges in my lower back when I have four or five full-sized carboys to lift up for racking.
Autosiphon with tubing, hydrometer and test jar, 1 gallon jug and cap.
First things first: I assembled my equipment and double-checked the instructions. Yes, I wrote them, but I’ve become slightly obsessive about double-checking them for accuracy. I’m the only guy I know who can argue with himself about following instructions that he wrote!
Not only are the Small Batch kits easy to lift, you can also place them just about anywhere. Rather than having to rack from a primary fermenter sitting on the counter to a carboy down to the floor, I popped the LBM onto a box on my countertop and put the jug beside it. I love working at counter height! Honestly, this has got to be one of the killer sell features of this kit: light weight, ease-of-use and dead simple, too.
If you’ve never seen an Autosyphon in action, the small version that came with the kit is a great piece of hardware. Plain syphons work fine, but you have to start them either by filling them with water, covering both ends and simultaneously plunging the pick-up rod into the wine and the hose into a bucket to catch the extra water, and then swap when the wine comes through, or by sticking them into the wine and sucking on the hose like you’re stealing gasoline from a car–which is a little unsettling, but sometimes an opportunity to ‘accidentally’ drink from the hose (wine, not gasoline).
Check out the Autosyphon action:
While the Autosyphon took care of racking the wine into the gallon jug, I did two more things. First, I deftly filled my hydrometer jar with wine so I could check the specific gravity, and second, I tilted the Little Big Mouth back towards the side of the jug that the syphon tip was in. Tilting it would allow me to get all of the liquid out of the jug, while the anti-sediment tip on the syphon prevented any yeast-goo from going into the jug.
Rack, because that’s how we roll.
Checking the hydrometer reading, I saw that it was good.
Remember, look across the surface of the wine, not the edge where it touches the glass.
The reading was 0.992–my wine was finished fermenting. Time to look at the instructions, where I wrote down the gravity from day one.
Every word, poetry.
We started at 1.090 and finished at 0.992. With a little math, we subtract the finishing gravity from the beginning, multiply by 131 and we get 1.090 – .992 = 0.98 and 0.98 x 131 = 12.838, or just shy of 13% alcohol, perfect for our Merlot.
Of course there was also the necessity for a quality control test.
The moment of truth . . .
Smelled young, but very good, with nice dark cherry notes. As for the taste . . .
I’d say he’s happy. Or getting tasered. One of the two.
The taste was impressive for such a young sample–it’s going to be pretty good!
The last thing to do was to put the cap an airlock onto the jug and clean up all the equipment I used–well, after I finished racking the other three wines!
Oh little wine jug how I love thee! Note the small amount of fizz–that’s CO2 gassing off, not fermentation.
I’m sold. It’s one thing to develop a kit in the laboratory and taste bench samples, but it’s another (and completely necessary) thing to do it right in your own kitchen, among the cats and cabbage rolls to see how it’s going to work in the real world. I’m happier with this kit than with anything I’ve done in a long time, and in 12 days I’m going to get it stabilising and cleared and then it’s off to bottling. Hurrah!
I’m smiling because I’m in the middle of a factory that processes hops–reason enough for a lunatic’s grin.
It’s been a full month since I last blogged. But to my defense, I’ve been a bit busy. In addition to my partnership with Midwest Supplies and our cool new Master Vintner line of winemaking products, I’ve been busy doing a few other things. First, I shot some videos:
And then I did a little bit of travelling. Since the end of August I’ve been to:
Minneapolis
Houston
Atlanta
Victoria
Denver
Seattle
Yakima
Boston
Virginia
Philadelphia
Minneapolis (again!)
Detroit
Chicago
Kelowna
Summerland
In that time I’ve been to Hop and Brew School, done wine opportunity seminars for consumer beverage retailers, Limited Edition wine and food pairing events, shot many videos, attended the Great Canadian Beer Festival, helped plan catalogues, merchandised stores, drank beer and laughed a lot.
And now I’m typing this up in an airport lounge waiting to jet off to Winnipeg. I’ve had some exceptionally good luck with local weather on my travels, and had a lot of fun working with my friends in all of the cities I’ve visited, and I’m looking forward to the same over the next week.
I’ve got three or four blogs lined up, and soon I’ll have some very exciting news to share, but that’ll have to wait another few days: I’ve got some sales training to do, another couple of Limited Edition wine tastings and a webinar session for the members of the Canadian Craft Winemakers Association.
Summer is here and for winemakers that means one thing: the inevitable return of our sworn enemy, Drosophila melanogaster, the common fruit fly. Minute little flying monkeys of doom, they’re hard to exclude from your winemaking areas, and while they’re easy to kill, by the time you’ve swatted one thirteen more have materialised out of thin air, looking for a free meal—females lay 400 eggs each, and they mature in as little as 7 days!
The reason why we need to be concerned over the little monsters isn’t just that they’re unsightly and chewy when you discover one inside a mouthful of Chardonnay. No, it’s their other name we need to think of, ‘Vinegar Fly’. The little blighters are filthy with acetobacteria, the organism that turns our delicious alcohol in to vinegar.
Time flies like an arrow. Fruit flies like a banana.
How to combat ‘em? First, understand that they don’t eat fruit: they eat mainly yeast. When they smell carbon dioxide and alcohol, they think it’s a piece of rotting fruit where they can lay eggs and get a delicious meal. When they smell a fermenting carboy, it’s their equivalent of a Vegas buffet ten thousand miles long.
Anybody who has ever worked as a bartender over the summer months knows the sad and icky truth: you come in for the first shift of the day and any bottles that have been left with an open pour-spout (‘speed spout’) overnight will need to be poured through a coffee filter to extract the little winged corpses from their watery graves. If a fermenting carboy smells a buffet, and bottle of vodka smells like ten tons of chocolate cake.
Step one in managing these horrific little pests is exclusion. You can’t keep them out of your house and your fermenting area, so you’ll need to exclude them from the wine itself. Always do covered fermentations. The commonest fermentation vessel used to start kit wines in the US is a 7.9 gallon (30 litre) bucket with a tight fitting lid and a port to plug in an airlock. By keeping the wine sealed and airlocked, you’ll deny entry.
Second, when your wine goes to the carboy, make sure you keep that airlock topped up with water. Some folks use sulphite, and while that’s mostly harmless the sulphite usually oxidises off in a few days into plain water. Other folks want the sanitising power of alcohol and load the airlock up with Everclear or grain alcohol—this only attracts the enemy!
Third, you’ll need to wipe up every single little tiny spill of wine or juice immediately, and sulphite the area to prevent any residue from getting a yeast film going on it. Then make sure you wash your cloths or discard your paper towels in a tightly sealed receptacle—the cloth used to wipe up the juice will become a source of attraction.
Fourth, if you have to wash all racked primary fermenters or carboys (those with lees and even a small amount of cloudy wine in them) immediately. If you can’t get to the right away, pop the bung and airlock on again.
Fifth, if you filter your wine (always a good idea—I’ll talk about that in a later blog) break down and clean your filter right away, and seal the used pads in a plastic bag before discarding them: they smell just dandy to fruit flies.
Flypaper only works on fruit flies by accident. Plus, some of the stuff is toxic as all get-out, and not good for winemaking areas. You can set up a wasp trap (available from hardware stores) for them. Normally they’re filled with fruit juice or other sweet liquid, but that doesn’t impress a fruit fly. Fill it with the magic formula: apple cider vinegar with a couple of drops of liquid dish soap. The apple cider vinegar drives them to a gustatory frenzy, while the dish soap removes the surface tension of the liquid: when they fly in and hit it, they drown right away—poof!
You can also, check out natural pyrethrin-based insecticides: they’re made from plant oils, are mostly safe and can be used in food prep areas. Never use any other kind of insecticide around wine or food prep areas! Triple-check to make sure you’ve got pyrethrin and not the synthetic pyrethroid, which is much more persistent and killier. Pyrethroids are bad for the environment and can be toxic to children and pets, especially kitty-cats, who lack the enzyme to break them down, and can rapidly succumb to pyrethroid toxicity. No kitty should be collateral damage to a fruit fly!
It should be noted that cleanly made wines that have fully fermented and are sulphited to an appropriate level (follow the manufacturer’s instructions) are fairly resistan against colonisation by acetobacteria. Sulphite in particular is a good bacterial inhibitor for this organism.
But there’s always that chance: a missed sulphite addition, a little extra oxygen pick-up in fermentation, one lone fruit fly wings in and . . . well, that’s thirty bottles of wine you can’t even pour on your salad (wild acetobacter fermentations make a kind of vinegar that tastes mostly like nail-polish remover).
One of the things that’s rarely discussed when the subject of cellaring comes up is the cellar itself. As the name implies, people used to put their wine in a hole in the ground, under their dwelling or winery. As long as human beings have striven to preserve food they’ve known that cool, steady temperatures, combined with moderate humidity would keep fruits, vegetables and meat from spoiling as quickly as it would in other conditions. Wine kept in these conditions not only lasts longer but also improves with time.
Cellars and caves work to conserve and age wine because they offer the perfect combination of environmental factors including:
Cool temperatures, usually in the 10-12C range (52-55F). Wine held here ages in a very slow and controlled manner. For every ten degree increase in the temperature, the speed of the chemical and biochemical reactions that govern ageing doubles, and some get out of control, causing the wine to die of old age while still young in years.
Steady temperatures. Variations of less than one degree per day, or five degrees between winter and summer are best. Every time a bottle of wine warms and cools, the wine inside it expands and contracts, alternately pushing and pulling on the cork. Some wine could leak out, or penetrate the cork, and air can enter the bottle. Obviously, neither of these is desirable.
Darkness—if not complete blackness then at least the absence of direct sources of UV radiation. While wine doesn’t go skunky in minutes like beer does in direct sunlight, it does age quicker and suffers from ‘photodegradation’.
Humidity—steady, around 70%. Any drier and corks can dry out. Once the end of a cork becomes dry, it wicks wine along just like the edge of a paper towel dipped in liquid. Eventually the wine level in the bottle drops, or the cork dries out completely and crumbles. Too much humidity and your corks will get mould, and your labels will disintegrate.
No vibration. Wine is a living thing, so constant jostling, thumping and vibrating unsettles it. Store a bottle of wine in an active paint-shaker and it will go bad in only a few minutes. Store it on top of the washing machine, and it won’t take many loads of delicates before it falls apart.
A ‘clean’ environment. Wine is a food product, and just like not storing angel-food cake next to garlic, you don’t want your precious wine snuggled up to paint thinner, compost or any other food or non-food item that could transfer flavours or aromas.
When asking how long wine will keep – that is, how long you can age it and still have it be drinkable – you’ll find that the answers can become quite complex. Most ageing recommendations tend to be very general, because there are so many variables to consider, including the type of wine, the storage conditions, and the quality of the cork (I’ll talk a lot about corks in an upcoming blog).
What is inside a bottle of wine often has less to do with how well it may age than the external conditions that it will be stored in. Under ideal conditions even inexpensive wines will age for years under a good cork. But those ‘ideal’ storage conditions include the absence of electromagnetic radiation (both visible and UV light), very high relative humidity, a temperature of 11C/52F, not varying by more than 1/10th of a degree over the course of one year, and an absence of any sort of vibration. Any divergence from these conditions could reduce a wine’s ageing potential.
And over here is the guest bedroom . . .
Cool, stable, quiet, humid, dark and clean—sounds pretty simple. But most of us aren’t going to be comfortable digging a big hole under the house, and if our home had all those attributes, it’s a pretty sure thing that we’re living in a cave or under a bridge with trolls. You could buy a fancy climate-controlled wine cabinet, but those can be expensive, especially if you’re making your own wine and building up a good collection. Alternatively, you can make do with what you’ve got on hand, and extend the life and cellaring potential of all of your wine. Easiest is to start by storing your wine in the coolest part of your home, away from direct light sources, off-odours or vibrations.
Time to fill this place up!
You can minimize the impact of temperature changes by keeping the wine up against a north-facing wall. Sunlight striking a foundation or the earth around it can cause a temperature flux, so steer clear of south-facing walls. You might also want to build an enclosure around your wine rack if it’s out in the open: this can help diminish convection currents, and increase thermal inertia. The enclosure doesn’t have to be anything fancy; you can create it from things as simple as Tyvek (the foam-board house insulating material), duct-tape and corner brackets.
In colder, drier climates like the north and the midwest, humidity can drop quite low, especially in winter. Too low and your corks will dry out, allowing oxidation and, potentially, leakage. Humidifiers sold for home use are not a good answer; they work too well, and can cause a build-up of mold and mildew in places like the basement, where air circulation is low. It makes more sense to set up a passive humidifier. Essentially this is a pan of water, a clean dishcloth and a cinderblock. Set the pan of water on top of the cinderblock in your wine cellar, drape the dishcloth half-in and half-out of the pan, and tuck the bottom end on top of the block. This will allow the towel to wick the moisture out of the pan and increase the evaporation into the air. The cinder block will hold any excess moisture and release it slowly, helping keep the humidity steady, even in a cellaring area a large as a thousand cubic feet.
Some wines are more susceptible than others to poor storage conditions. In general, white wines–particularly off-dry wines and Champagne – are frailer than reds. Grape variety can also make a difference to how well the wine does in storage; so you would find that a robust variety like Cabernet Sauvignon is generally more resilient than delicate one like Pinot Noir.
Looks fine, but it could probably use a bit of ageing.
With a newly bottled wine, it’s tempting to start consuming it right after bottling. While there are many wines that can be consumed young and be everything you want them to be, if you really would prefer to maximize your wine’s potential, a little time in the bottle can make an enormous difference. Most red wines begin life with obvious fruity aromas and some degree of astringency or bite, but with ongoing ageing, they develop softer, gentler, more complex aromas and flavours. The wines become richer as the fruit mellows and as the astringent tannins relax and contribute to the body and character.
Maybe not this long . . .
Cellaring wine used to be a rich man’s game. In centuries past, only wine merchants storing stock for future sale, or the very wealthy could afford to purchase age-worthy wines in large volumes, and then wait as the years passed to sample them as they approached their peak. The French used to say that you didn’t buy Bordeaux for yourself, you bought it for your children, while you drank the wine your father had bought. Things are a little easier with modern wines. Most of them are designed to be more drinkable sooner and even a moderate amount of cellaring will help bring out their best.
You can find any number of articles on filtering wine—a quick search on the inter-webs yields something like forty-four million hits—and probably double that number of opinions on the topic. Winemaker magazine has run many articles on filtering, including an excellent one by their regular kits columnist, what’s-his-name. So there’s no dearth of information on the topic.
What there is, in fact, is a surfeit of information on the mechanics and execution of filtering, the how-to side of the process. What you don’t see very often is the other side, the philosophical, the ‘why-to’ side, or the ‘why-not-to’ side. That’s up three sides now, making it perilously close to geometry, but there are a bunch of issues surrounding filtering that come up over and over again in winemaking discussions.
Do I have to filter my wine?
What are the benefits to filtering, long and short-term?
What are the potential downsides to filtering?
Does filtering strip colour, flavour or aroma from a wine?
Do I have to use fining agents if I’m going to filter anyway?
What’s the best filter to use?
With these questions usually come some very strong opinions. In some cases the strongest opinions come from people who’ have a little knowledge and the proverbial danger that comes with that, but opinion isn’t limited to them: some of the most knowledgeable winemakers, making some of the most expensive and well regarded wines in the world have very strong opinions as well, and some of them directly contradict each other.
In fact, the Oxford Companion to Wine (full disclosure: I’m a contributor to that august tome) even lists filtration as a ‘controversial’ subject. From the OCtW:
Filtration of fine wines is a controversial issue. While it may be a necessity for ordinary commercial wines, it is widely thought that too heavy a filtration can indeed rob a fine wine of some of its complexity and capacity to age, not to mention some loss of colour, particularly a red wine as subtle as some fine red Burgundy. Some commentators and winemakers claim that filtration of any sort is harmful: it is not uncommon to see the term ‘unfiltered’ used as a positive marketing term.
Gadzooks! Loss of complexity! Loss of capacity to age! Any filtering harmful! Is there no upside to filtering? Well, maybe, as the entry goes on to say:
However, the possible negative effects of filtration should be weighed against the very real risk of microbial contamination or instability, particularly where perfect storage or transport conditions cannot be guaranteed. An unfiltered wine throws a much heavier crust, or sediment, than one that has been filtered.
What to think? Well, first of all, keep in mind that the venerable Oxford is almost exclusively concerned with commercial winemaking. Out of thousands of entries there’s only one on home winemaking, and until I re-wrote it, it never mentioned kit wines and only devoted half a sentence to ‘concentrate’, so their opinion might be a little fluffy around the edges, not close to the rich, meaty centre of winemaking where us consumer winemakers make our bones. We don’t need a marketing department to tell us how our wine tastes when there’s a perfectly good glass right there at our elbow.
Second, I’m discussing only the filtering systems and processes available to home winemakers–yes, cross-flow filters are like amazing magic boxes that can accomplish astounding feats of clarity, but until they drop below $20,000 and require less than 100 gallons to prime the pump, they’re not going to be of any use to real, live home winemakers.
1) Do I have to filter my wine?
Nope, at the end of the day filtration isn’t necessary. In the 10,000 year-plus history of winemaking, filtration has only been possible in the last century or so, after the advent of industrial processing and a firm understanding of the microbiology of wine (thanks, Louis Pasteur!).
With modern winemaking technology, wine kits come almost completely free of suspended solid material. Precisely calculated fining agent use, in the form of bentonite, Chitosan, isinglass and kieselsol, deals with any colloids (like proteins) and 99% of the yeast in a very short time, leaving the wine clean and quite clear.
So you don’t have to filter if you a) don’t have a filter, b) don’t want to go to the trouble, or c) don’t care. You’ll still have clear, drinkable wine.
2) What are the benefits to filtering, long and short-term?
In the short term, you will be able to expect what the industry calls ‘star bright’ wines. I said the finings leave the wine clean and quite clear, but not completely clear. After fining there can still be tens of thousands or even millions of yeast cells still floating around in your wine. There can also be unstable colloids floating around. These materials will take the edge off of clarity. There are two analogies that fit pretty well here. First, if you’re an eyeglass wearer, you know well that you can look through your spectacles and see clearly almost all of the time. But if you take them off at any random interval and have a look at the lenses, they can be pretty smeary and icky. A quick polish will allow you to see more clearly and accurately.
The second analogy works even for the perfectly-sighted: the difference between a well-fined wine and a filtered wine is the difference between a freshly washed car and a freshly waxed car. They both look good, and they both look shiny, but the waxed car really looks spectacular, and is much more appealing to most people who will look at it.
Long-term you can look forward to greater stability. Stability in this case is defined as the wine not changing in flavour or appearance during storage in the bottle. As the Oxford notes above, there are issues with microbiological stability and with deposits or sediments in unfiltered wine.
Microbiological stability merits a mention, but not too much concern. Since all kit wines are pasteurised at packaging, there are very few potential contamination organisms that will show up in your batch. The one place where filtration provides extra protection is for wines that have residual sugar, or sugar added post-fermentation via ‘F-packs’, ‘sweetening packs’ or ‘Süsse-reserve’. Putting these wines through a filter will help reduce the yeast population below the level at which they can ferment sugar into carbon dioxide and alcohol, keeping your sweet wine from turning into fizzy, bottle-shattering dry wine. Toss in a bit of sorbate to keep the remaining yeast from breeding back to culture strength (from where they can start making fizz-and-booze again) and you’ve got increased stability over the long term.
Another long-term benefit is in the appearance of the wine over time. Deposits and sediments can (and indeed, almost always will) form in fined but unfiltered wines over a long enough timeline. These deposits show up in reds as a thin layer of purple or red material on the bottom of the bottle or in a line along the side. In whites they appear as white-ish or beige. They can be dead yeast cells, polymerised phenols (a kind of tannin that’s gooped up and settled out) or (in reds) pigmented tannins. Pigmented tannins occur when tannins bind with anthocyanins.
If you’re getting a sore head from all the polysyllabic terms here, tannins are (mostly) the compounds in red wine that give astringency and mouth-feel, and anthocyanins are colour compounds. The process is insanely complex, from a chemical point of view, but when they bind together over time they can settle out as a very fine, almost paint-like layer of muck.
Filter, and you’re not likely to see any fall-out in your bottles over the medium (three to 5 years) term, and much lower levels after that.
3) What are the potential downsides to filtering?
Surprisingly, they’re pretty much the same as the downsides for any handling or processing operation in winemaking, from racking to fining and stabilising: the chance that you’ll introduce a contaminant or too much oxygen into the wine, causing an infection or oxidation.
Both of these are easily avoided. First and foremost, as in all aspects of life, with winemaking cleanliness is next to goodliness. Every piece of equipment that comes into contact with your wine must be clean—free of visible dirt or debris—and sanitised—treated with a chemical sanitiser to kill or suppress bacteria. Filter machines often have a lot of hoses, clamps, crevices and irregular surfaces, so be sure to disassemble them and give ‘em a good scrubbing, treat them with sulphite or other suitable winemaking sanitiser/suppressant, and rinse the dickens out of them.
As for oxygen, filtering agitates wine as it travels through pumps, hoses and filter media, but doesn’t necessarily introduce oxygen into it. Most filter set-ups are positively pressurised, meaning they use a pump to force wine down a hose and through the system. If there is a leak somewhere in the filter between the pump and the carboy the wine is going into, it’s going to squirt wine out, not suck air in.
The only real danger that using a filter will add oxygen is if you run the output hose down the side of the receiving carboy, where it can fan out and expose an enormous surface area to oxygen pick up—gently place the output hose directly into the bottom of the carboy instead, and allow the tip to submerge as it fills, keeping everything as quiet as possible.
What you really have to watch is that there is sufficient free sulphur dioxide (metabisulphite) in the wine to protect it during handling. This will be the amount included in the kit, added in full, at the appropriate time. Just a hint: if your kit has a note in the instructions about optional added sulphite for ageing terms over six months, add it before you filter, even if you’re going to drink the wine up sooner. This is prudent because the very small extra amount the instructions ask for, usually a quarter-teaspoon, which is less than a gram and a half, won’t change the flavour or aroma of the wine, but will make sure the extra handling that filtering represents doesn’t cause harm.
3) Does filtering strip colour, flavour or aroma from a wine?
Yes and no. But mostly no, and the aroma and flavour part is strictly temporary, and the colour part is good. I’ll explain, but first I’ll qualify: I’m telling you the strict truth, for people using filters available to people making their own wine at home. You might read contradicting opinions somewhere else but keep in mind two things: first, some of those opinions will be from people who have access to commercial filtering equipment and processes, which can be vastly more effective at removing things from wine. Second, they’re probably wrong.
Magenta wine?
Colour
The kinds of filters available to home winemakers operate on the micron scale, with the tightest, most efficient filters stopping somewhere above 0.2µ, about two-tenths of a micron. Your typical yeast cell is around 0.45µ, and a freshly budded daughter cell (they grow up so fast, sniff) is down at the 0.2µ mark. It’s far more common to see filters that allow the passage of material as large as two to four microns in size.
Colour molecules, the aforementioned anthocyanins, are not on the micron size. They are so very much smaller that their structure can’t be seen with a microscope. They’re so tiny that in fact they will sail straight through a filter pad or cartridge entirely unimpeded—you can’t filter them out.
Which begs the question, for anyone who has ever used a filter on a red wine, why do the pads come out stained with colour? Those stains aren’t pure, happy colour compounds: they are colour compounds that have already bound to other kinds of goo in the wine. When bound to tannin, they’ll fall out later as a deposit (mentioned above) and when bound to a colloid, they’ll fall out as sediment. This is a vast over-simplification (I specialise in those) but the core truth is that you cannot filter out colour with civilian filter pads—not any colour that wouldn’t fall out on its own anyway.
This nose knows nosing–and dogs know filtering doesn’t ‘strip’ aroma.
Flavour and Aroma
What goes for colour compounds goes for flavour and aroma: they’re just too small to stick to filter pads. And yet anyone who has ever filtered a wine has almost certainly noted that it tastes notably less distinct and aromatic post-filtering.
This is a complex phenomenon wine, referred to under the catch-all phrase ‘bottle shock’. A couple of explanations are popular. First, a dose of sulphite (usually added at bottling or filtering) mutes the flavour and aroma of the wine. Seems plausible enough, and easily observed by anyone who has ever tasted a wine right after sulphiting it.
Second, if a wine gets a significant dose of oxygen during handling, some of the oxygen can combine with ethanol and other alcohols to form aldehydes, which really cramp a wine’s aromatic styling. The good news is, both of these conditions are temporary. Give the wine a few weeks rest, and often only 24 hours will do it, and the aromas and flavours snap back into focus, good as new, with filtering not to blame after all.
I said earlier that anyone who disagrees with me is wrong. I still think that, but there is a way in which they’re reaching towards a sort-of truth about filtering and removing desirable compounds from wine. When a wine, particularly a red one, is very young, you want to get it off of the gross lees and then the fine lees quite rapidly, with several rackings taking place in the first year. This prevents yeast cells from decaying and transferring their flavour into the wine, and prevents all kinds of grape pulp and vineyard muck from getting funky as well. But you don’t want to strip the wine clear of all compounds right away. There are extremely complex chemical reactions and biochemical processes that can benefit from the presence of solid material dissolved and suspended in the wine as it goes through elevage (upbringing).
That doesn’t add up to an indictment of filtering, however, it just means that you should filter as the last step in your process before you go to the bottle—too early and you might cheat an ageing/elevage process of some compounds that could help.
This wine should not be filtered–it isn’t clear enough.
5) Do I have to use fining agents if I’m going to filter anyway?
YES! You can’t filter a wine that isn’t already really, really clear. The amount of yeast and good in suspension would clog a filter up so badly that you’d spend more than the cost of the wine kit itself in filter pads before you got to the end.
If we go back to the car analogy, you can’t wax a car that hasn’t already been washed thoroughly: waxing isn’t to remove dirt it’s to put a final polish on the car. Filtering isn’t to clear wine it’s to put a final polish on it right before bottling.
Buon Vino Super Jet: excellent balance of speed and efficiency
6) What’s the best filter to use?
The most common filters available to home users are depth filters with plate and frames and positive displacement pumps. This means they’ve got some kind of structure of layered plates that trap cellulose pads in between them and the wine is forced through the pads by a pump that pushes it down a tube. There are others, including ones that use a vacuum to pull the wine through a plate and frame, membrane filters that use a setup identical to home water-filter cartridges, either with a pump or a vacuum, and even manual ones that rely on gravity to dribble the wine through a pad set-up.
Cue Jeremy Clarkson, ‘MORE POWER!’
Commercial wine filters can be much more complex, but most of them you can’t afford to switch on for less than a few hundred gallons of wine—a single 6-gallon/23 litre batch wouldn’t even prime some of the pumps. Things like cross-flow filters, centrifuge decanters, pressure leaf filters and rotary drum vacuum filters are amazing technology, but for most of us rather like swatting a housefly by dropping a mountain range on it.
I’m big on positive displacement plate and frame filters. They’re simple, very easy to set up and use, widely available, and ideal for our purposes. They come in sizes ranging from just smaller than a toaster, suitable for one or perhaps two batches at a go, to models big enough to do 20 gallons in a reasonably short time, and others intended for higher volumes that can filter a carboy sparkling clear in under 30 seconds. I own examples of all three, and they’re fine machines.
They’re called depth filters because the pads used in them act like a sponge, soaking up the wine and wringing it out clean on the other side, with the ‘sponge’ part retaining the cloudy goop. This makes them capable of taking quite a bit of muck out of the wine before they clog up. When they do, you toss ‘em out, because they’re cheap.
There’s no objection I can think of to using a vacuum system, set-up to pull wine from one carboy to another, with a plate and frame in between, other than an incremental increase in complexity while using it—if you’ve got a vacuum pump, more power (power vacuum?) to you.
But I’m not big on membrane filtration. Filter cartridges are best suited to water or air filtering, where they have to deal with fairly low levels of material. The issue is that membrane filters act as a screen-door, rather than a sponge. They usually have a fan-folded cartridge that almost behaves like a two-dimensional object. Anything larger than the holes in the membrane piles up on one side and clear wine passes through.
That is, until the cartridge membrane is completely blocked: because it’s a screen, there’s no depth to soak up lots of goo. After that you have to change it, or clean it before it can filter more wine. This can be done, but handled carelessly, as by backflushing with too much pressure, cartridge integrity can be compromised, allowing material to pass through.
And cartridges are much more expensive than filter pads. There are inexpensive examples, but they won’t be as effective or as strictly rated as more expensive ones. There’s not enough room in this article to discuss the difference between nominal and absolute micron ratings, but when you buy inexpensive cartridges, you’re getting pretty much what you pay for. It’s kind of the ‘toner model’ of computer printers—the money in cartridge filter systems is made in replacement cartridges, not in the actual system itself, so that’s where you pay if you purchase one.
It should be pretty obvious after these points that I’m a fan of filtering, and mostly with positive displacement depth filters. But you would be surprised how often I don’t filter. A lot of the time I’m too lazy. My reds sit for a couple of years before I get around to them, and by that time I’m out of wine and in a hurry, so I just get them in the bottle and pretty immediately into the wine rack. I’m more likely to filter whites, but even then my slack attitude towards a production schedule has me bottling without filtration at least part of the time. But with that, I have to put up with the occasional deposit in the bottle, which is fine for me, but puts a crimp in giving away bottles or sharing with others.
In the end, whether or not you should filter should come down to your own preference, your tolerance for extra processing steps, and the attitudes of those who will be consuming the wine—but don’t worry in any case: filtering won’t hurt your wine in any way, and can help improve the aroma and maintain its appearance over time.
Making wine from a kit is an awesome way to become your own personal vintner. The kits provide all of the ingredients and materials to turn out a couple of cases of wine in less than a couple of months, and the instructions are complete, clear, and very easy to understand.
Everything you need! Well, except for the kit. And patience. Patience is the tough one.
Ahem. Given that I wrote most of the kit instructions out there over the years, it’s understandable that I’ve got a positive feeling about them. However, I’m aware that not everyone thinks they are as clear as they could be, and it almost always seems there’s too much detail or not enough.
One area where it’s difficult to convey the exact intent is in stirring. When you reconstitute the kit on day one, it’s important to stir hard enough to mix the juice thoroughly–easy enough. On fining/stabilising day stirring is even more important: you have to agitate the wine hard enough to disperse the trapped carbon dioxide gas. If you don’t, not only will the wine be slow to clear, it will be fizzy at bottling time and will always have a slightly off aroma and flavour–that trapped CO2 will carry a bit of other, nastier gases with it, like hydrogen sulphide and dimethyl sulphide: rotten eggs and cooked cabbage respectively.
In actual fact, you shouldn’t ‘stir’ your wine kit. Stirring merely moves the wine around, like a lazy kid on a merry-go-round. You need to agitate the wine hard enough to get all of the gas out.
This is why I’ve always recommended a drill-mounted wine whip.
Ready for blast-off!
To use one of these, once it’s sanitised, the top goes into the chuck of a high-speed reversible hand drill (plug-in kinds are best–those battery jobs always seem to be flat when you need them) and the three prongs are folded and inserted into the carboy or bucket. When you’re de-gassing, you always use the whip at full power, except at the very beginning, when you test to see how much gas saturation the wine has. Everything is fun and games until you’ve got Krakatoa Cabernet fountaining out of the carboy and onto the ceiling. Sequence goes like this:
Quick, one-second experimental stir. If things don’t instantly spray out of the carboy, proceed to step two.
Go absolutely full power, and keep it there.
When the wine begins to swirl up the sides of the carboy, looking like it’s going to overflow, immediately reverse direction, and go full power, against the flow of wine.
You’ll see the wine stop climbing up immediately. Keep it on full until it starts to climb up again, and repeat the reversal–full power.
Repeat this twice more, always full-on.
If your wine is not de-gassed at this point, it’s because the gods of fermentation hate you, or your wine was not finished fermenting, or your wine is very cold and it’s a bright sunny day (high barometric pressure). But I’m betting on some kind of divine divine vengeance because I’ve never needed more than three spins each way, less than two minutes altogether.
The point of intense agitation is to cause tip-vortex cavitation in the wine, at the tips of the whip. Cavitation happens when you vaporise a liquid by exposing it to decreased pressure. This vapour is the same thing as steam from a boiling kettle, but doesn’t involve heat–just the pressure reduction.
This is a little hard to visualise, but it obeys the laws of thermodynamics perfectly. The most common place to see cavitation is in boat propellers. Spin them up too fast and they won’t push the boat, because they’ll be in a cavity of water vapour, whirling about and doing nothing (unless they’re special supercavitating propellers, but let’s pretend they don’t exist).
“Attenshan crew: pleashe ignore my ridiculoush accshent and obvioush toupee. That ish all.”
For the last couple of decades I’ve been telling people about cavitation by quoting the 1990 movie The Hunt for Red October. It’s a techno-thriller about Soviet-era espionage and features Sean Connery as a Russian sub commander with a ridiculous Scottish lisp. In the fateful scene the commie sub tries to make a run for it but the propellers spin too fast and they cavitate. Why this is a crucial plot point is that during cavitation, when the vapour bubble collapses (as all good bubbles eventually do), they slam shut with such violence that they ‘hammer’ the water, which makes a large enough noise to alert enemy sonar operators. It’s this slamming/hammering effect that literally blasts carbon dioxide bubbles out of suspension, and why stirring any slower is almost useless for de-gassing.
(Not only does this make a really great echo for sonar operators who might be looking for Rooskies, in extreme cases it can cause sonoluminescence, a burst of photons [light] from the bubble collapse. You know why it does this? Good, that makes one of you. Nobody actually has a lock on the theory of why a collapsing bubble in a liquid makes light. It just does. Probably quantum, or Vogons or something.)
That analogy worked for the first decade, less well for the next, and now it doesn’t carry any weight with people under the age of twenty-five, who never lived with a Soviet Union, just a big old Russian crazy-quilt of ongoing collapse and oligarchic wealth transfer. I’ve been trying to find a new handle on the moment, and Just This Day I found one, courtesy of Smarter Every Day. If you’re not familiar with them, you’re welcome. Destin and his support crew demonstrate scientific and physical principles in extremely clear ways and film them (sometimes at twenty thousand frames per second!) and post them on YouTube. If you’re a science geek/covert nerd like me, that link is going to suck up a lot of your time for a while. My apologies to your family.
Here’s the video, in which they shoot an AK47 in an (empty) swimming pool.
It’s over ten minutes long, and while I urge you to watch all of this fascinating and brilliantly executed demonstration, if you’ve got a cake in the oven or are being chased by zombies, you can fast-forward to 4:30 for the most excellent illustration of the hammering effect of the bubble collapse. The AK47 bullet travels through the water, pulling a vapour bubble behind it. The bubble collapses, and as it does, you can actually see the intense shock wave that the collapse produces. And it hammers so hard, it rebounds and produces a secondary shock as well!
Imagine what being shot with a Russian carbine would do to a carbonated beverage. Yep, it would really go a long way to de-gassing it. And that’s the same kind of action you get when you stir your kit wine with a whip at full speed, only with less bullets and collateral damage.
The question could come up, ‘Why are you so hot on that three-prong whip, Tim? It’s much more expensive than the other drill-mounted stirring whips on the market–do they pay you?’
Alas, I only wish I got a commission on those things. I’ve been pushing them like a madman since I saw the first one. It’s purely a functional thing–the other models of whip work, but they’re not quite as effective, for a couple of reasons. First, most of the other whips cannot take the force of being reversed under full power. Their stubby little blades shear right off, or the hook-ish shaped ones twist themselves into a knot.
Second, if it’s the speed of the tip of the whip/propeller that makes the vortex appear, then spinning a set of three whips spanning a circle nearly a foot across at the same RPM as a wee stubby little set of blades will make those long whip-tips travel immensely faster–they have to to cover the same complete circle as the wee little ones, so they’re hustling much faster.
So there you have it. Please don’t fire an assault rifle into your carboy. Instead, get a drill and one of those amazing three-prong whips and you’ll be out of gas faster than a ’59 Caddy.
A discourse from the source, of course, of course.
I’m heading to Virginia next week for the Winemaker Magazine 2014 conference, June 5-7 at the fabulous Lansdowne Resort in DC’s ‘Wine Country’. I haven’t missed a conference since the very first, in Monterey back in 2008. I love the Winemaker conference: even though I have to work during the conference I get a chance to meet old friends, find out how their wines are coming along, see how they’re doing and generally catch up with a great bunch of people. In all these years I haven’t met one winemaker I wouldn’t be happy to have as a guest in my house. I think there’s something about taking winemaking seriously that self-selects for thoughtful, happy folks.
Lecturing to a sharp crowd
This is going to be an especially cool year. I’m teaching a one-day Winemaking Boot Camp. It’s going to be an intensive one-day course with a lot of hands-on trials of advanced equipment, for bottling, transferring, processing and testing. It was a bit of a scramble pulling it all together since my previous corporate sponsor is no longer involved with the conference, but with the help of some friends (more on that soon) and the understanding and largesse of Winemaker Magazine (thanks Brad!) I think I’ve put together a really outstanding program.
I’ve got a little file on that . . .
The really cool part is going to be on post-fermentation correction of wine character. This is the secret stuff that in my former life I was obligated to discourage, since it wasn’t part of the program for our products–the companies stances have always been that wines made from kits should be considered complete in themselves. While this is technically true, that still leaves an awful lot of room for tweaking kits, especially now that the toolbox and palette of professional winemakers is now available to retail consumers! It’s going to be a ton of fun!
Well, if I get that case of wine across the border, that is . . . hmm.
You can follow me on Facebook and Twitter for ongoing updates ( #WineMagConf) from on the ground.
Also, as always bookmark this page and check back: good news is always just around the corner!
“Hawaii is not a state of mind, but a state of grace.” – Paul Theroux
Who can take a place this beautiful seriously?
And thats where I’m headed. I’m working on my sixth decade, and despite relative proximity (can’t get much closer to Hawaii and still live in Canada) I’ve never visited the islands. It’s been a cold winter and a terrifically interesting year so far, and I need a break from shivering and hustling.
Sadly I had rotator cuff surgery last week and that means no snorkeling. Quelle dommage! But I’ll muddle through with the help of beaches, waterfalls, musubi, poke, pork and probably a wee tot of rum. Or two.
I’ll be hitting the ground running when I get back. First I’ll be teaching a homebrewing class at Beyond the Grape in Port Moody (want to learn how to do your first brew with grains, hops and extract? Call Michael or click here and get hooked up!)
Smile and the whole world smiles with you. Drink, and you won’t care.
Right after that it’s the Winemaker Magazine 2014 conference June 5-7th in Virginia. I’ll be teaching a boot camp seminar that will include the use of advanced equipment (vacuum bottle fillers! Home laboratories! Super-secret ingredients!) and top-level techniques for making your best wine ever! I’ve never taught anyone this stuff before, so the folks who attend are going to have secret knowledge!
It’s shaping up to be a busy year. I’m looking forward to it!
Tim Vandergrift Worldwide Product Development Laboratories
FOR IMMEDIATE DISSEMINATION
TVR (Tim Vandergrift Research–a division of TVCC Worldwide) is excited to announce a completely new product category for consumer wine and beer makers! For thousands of years, people from every walk of life have taken pride and pleasure from fermenting their own wine, beer, mead, sake, etc., not only because of the delicious beverages that result, but also from the sense of accomplishment and purpose that making things with your own hand can bring.
However, while consumers freely share their wine and beer with family and friends, there has always been one member of the family that has been left out: the cat.
Hey, who’s shoe do I have to soil to get a drink around here?
Around the world, over 90 million domestic cats are kept as pets, and in North America one-third of all households have at least one cat. While we lavish our feline companions with soft beds, dangly toys, good quality food and treats, they have never been able to participate in our rituals of wine consumption—until now.
After nearly a decade of research, TVR has produced the first home winemaking kit exclusively for cat owners, Nepeta Cellars ‘Le Chat Mechant’. Available in an easy-to-use format, it allows users to produce 4 litres (one gallon) of an invigorating, stimulating beverage that your cat will find irresistible.
Fragrant and lush, drives cats mad
The base is made from first quality Nepeta Cataria, grown by artisanal farmers in British Columbia. With extremely high levels of cyclopentanoid monoterpenes (the active molecules in catnip) this provides the kick cats desire and crave.
“Cat ‘wine’ cannot be based on alcohol”, says Dr. Stanley Owsley, head researcher. “Even relatively small amounts of alcohol are dangerous to cats. That’s where the specially developed ‘stutter-step’ yeast comes in.”
G.O.O.F.Y, engineered to not make alcohol
“Genetically Obviated Ortho-Flocculant YeastTM, also known as ‘stutter-step’ will ferment the sugars in the base, extracting the active ingredients in the catnip.” Dr. Owsley notes. “ However, as soon as it reaches 1% alcohol, the yeast re-absorbs and breaks down the alcohol, then starts over. In this way the active ingredients are extracted, slowly and smoothly, without any permanent production of alcohol that could harm feline neurological systems.”
Rich, green and fragrant, with aromas of mint, heather and tuna
In addition catnip and the necessary sugars in the base, flavours include tuna, rodent, chicken and turkey with giblets, for the savoury tastes that cats crave.
And crave it they will! Not only are cats are delighted with the flavour, they go bonkers for the effects. According to Feline Attractant, cis,trans-Nepetalactone: Metabolism in the Domestic Cat (Waller, Price and Mitchell 1969), behaviors include sniffing, scratching, rolling, increased motor activity, running, vocalisations, terrorising other pets and spaced-out drooling.
Side effects include agitation, sleepiness, and potential psychotic episodes
And not only is Le Chien Mechant completely safe (Behavioral and toxicological studies of cyclopentanoid monoterpenes from Nepeta cataria. Harney, Barofsky and Leary, 1978) it’s non-addictive and improves cardiac function and blood pressure in exposed cats.
Red with fish, White with fish.
If you love making your own wine and beer, and love your cat, you’ll love making Le Chat Mechant for them! Available April 1st at all good home wine and beer retailers.
