An early press

After only a week, it was clear that fermentation on our Cab had slowed down.  Usually, we keep our must in our primary fermenter all the way through secondary fermentation, even after the cap falls (thanks to our early investment in a CO2 tank).  However, given that there was a good amount of green still in the seeds, and we don't really care for vegetal-tasting wines, we decided to press on the early side, and go through a more traditional pattern of primary fermentation in an open fermenter; secondary in airtight carboys.

So, we rented a press and pressed both batches in one day.

Notes on pressing:

Zinfandel must is messy - we really need to learn to press in small batches; as it's a gloppy mess that will spray at all angles outside the side of the press.  But after pressing our 15 gallons of must, we got about 8 gallons of very young wine.

Cabernet must was much more straightforward to press.  We got a total of 18  gallons of wine out of the 30 gallons of must.

From here, we want to keep the temperature relatively warm to ensure malolactic fermentaion (MLF) completes.  This apparently takes from 4-6 weeks, and temps around 70 degrees is good for this. The juice/wine still has a lot of setiment in it; and we need to stir up each carboy every other day or so, to ensure the yeast and MLF bacteria is able to continue to do it's job (convert sugar to alcohol and convert malic acid to lactic acid, respectively).