Why You Can’t Always Assume What Your Wine Is Doing

With a number of batches of wine under my belt I subconciously must have felt that I could “sense” how my current batch of wine was progressing. I quickly found out that this was unfortunately not the case and here’s why!

I started working on a batch of white wine back in November and I made the mistake of rushing through the preparation so that I could just get it done versus enjoying the moment.

The one thing I didn’t cut corners on though was cleaning the equipment, which I had soaking in a pink solution overnight so I was good there.

I added all of the ingredients as I should except for the yeast …

The package suggested that I hydrate the yeast first but I felt it would be fine if I just sprinkled it onto the wine must (as other kits I had done said to do that so I figured I was good to go). 

I tested the S.G. and temperature and everything looked good.

I then added a brew belt to the primary and let things begin.

Now I typically judge how things are progressing with my wine by the yeast smell and the bubbling in the airlock and while there was definitely a yeasty smell after a few days I didn’t see much in the way of bubbling action going on. This was concerning!

I decided to leave the brew belt on for a few more days (due to the lower temperature in my basement) to see if that would help and it didn’t seem to.

Convinced that the fermentation was stuck I went to the local wine making supply store and bought more yeast in anticipation of having to start over again.

The guy at the store suggested that the wine was starved of oxygen so leave the lid on the primary unsealed to let oxygen in – this should help with the fermentation. He also clarified that you typically don’t have to rehydrate dry yeast with kits but you would have to with fruit wine since the since the juice wasn’t balanced for things like sugar levels or acid levels and therefore need a bit of a “kit start”. Thought that was interesting!

When I got home I decided to test the SG before I added more yeast fully expecting it to only have moved a little but was absolutely shocked to find out that the fermentation was completely finished! That’s right, it had feremented from 1.08 all the way down to 0.998 but had done it really “discretely”.

I absolutely couldn’t believe it! So just when you think you can sense how well your wine is doing, it’s best to get the real picture of what’s going on by double checking with some simple measurements like SG.

Certainly a lesson learned for me!

On a side note:

I had left the yeast packet in my jacket pocket and only realized this after I had put my jacket into the washing machine that was set to use warm water. Luckily I remembered this early on in the washing process and I can only imagine how my clothees would have smelt after being washed in warm water and yeast after 30 minutes …