{"id":262,"date":"2014-08-18T08:28:08","date_gmt":"2014-08-18T15:28:08","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.timvandergrift.com\/?p=262"},"modified":"2014-08-18T08:28:08","modified_gmt":"2014-08-18T15:28:08","slug":"the-enemy-without","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.timvandergrift.com\/?p=262","title":{"rendered":"The Enemy Without"},"content":{"rendered":"
\"fruit-fly\"<\/a>
A face only nobody could love<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

Summer\u00a0is 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\u2019re hard to exclude from your winemaking areas, and while they\u2019re easy to kill, by the time you\u2019ve swatted one thirteen more have materialised out of thin air, looking for a free meal\u2014females lay 400 eggs each, and they mature in as little as 7 days!<\/p>\n

The reason why we need to be concerned over the little monsters isn\u2019t just that they\u2019re unsightly and chewy when you discover one inside a mouthful of Chardonnay. No, it\u2019s their other name we need to think of, \u2018Vinegar Fly\u2019. The little blighters are filthy with acetobacteria, the organism that turns our delicious alcohol in to vinegar.<\/p>\n

\"fly<\/a>
Time flies like an arrow. Fruit flies like a banana.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

How to combat \u2018em? First, understand that they don\u2019t eat fruit: they eat mainly yeast. When they smell carbon dioxide and alcohol, they think it\u2019s a piece of rotting fruit where they can lay eggs and get a delicious meal. When they smell a fermenting carboy, it\u2019s their equivalent of a Vegas buffet ten thousand miles long.<\/p>\n

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 (\u2018speed spout\u2019) 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.<\/p>\n

Step one in managing these horrific little pests is exclusion. You can\u2019t keep them out of your house and your fermenting area, so you\u2019ll 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\u2019ll deny entry.<\/p>\n

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\u2019s 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\u2014this only attracts the enemy!<\/p>\n

Third, you\u2019ll 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\u2014the cloth used to wipe up the juice will become a source of attraction.<\/p>\n

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\u2019t get to the right away, pop the bung and airlock on again.<\/p>\n

Fifth, if you filter your wine (always a good idea\u2014I\u2019ll 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.<\/p>\n

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\u2019re filled with fruit juice or other sweet liquid, but that doesn\u2019t 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\u2014poof!<\/p>\n

You can also, check out natural pyrethrin-based insecticides: they\u2019re 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\u2019ve 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!<\/p>\n

It should be noted that cleanly made wines that have fully fermented and are sulphited to an appropriate level (follow the manufacturer\u2019s instructions) are fairly resistan against colonisation by acetobacteria. Sulphite in particular is a good bacterial inhibitor for this organism.<\/p>\n

But there\u2019s always that chance: a missed sulphite addition, a little extra oxygen pick-up in fermentation, one lone fruit fly wings in and . . . well, that\u2019s thirty bottles of wine you can\u2019t even pour on your salad (wild acetobacter fermentations make a kind of vinegar that tastes mostly like nail-polish remover).<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Summer\u00a0is 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\u2019re hard to exclude from your winemaking areas, and while they\u2019re easy to kill, by the time you\u2019ve swatted one thirteen more have materialised out of thin … <\/p>\n

Continue reading “The Enemy Without”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[21,30,65,64,19,78,69,13,54],"tags":[108,81,82,106,105,16,114],"class_list":["post-262","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-alcohol","category-brewing","category-homemade-wine","category-kit-wine","category-science","category-storage","category-sulfite","category-wine","category-winemaking","tag-brewing","tag-fruit-flies","tag-sanitation","tag-science","tag-wine","tag-wine-kits","tag-winemaking"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.timvandergrift.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/262","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.timvandergrift.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.timvandergrift.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.timvandergrift.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.timvandergrift.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=262"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"http:\/\/www.timvandergrift.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/262\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":267,"href":"http:\/\/www.timvandergrift.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/262\/revisions\/267"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.timvandergrift.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=262"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.timvandergrift.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=262"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.timvandergrift.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=262"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}