El Dorado County Zin In

Our friends up in Fair Play once again offered up some of their Zinfandel for our home wine making efforts - yeay! We worked around an already packed weekend by having Mom deliver the must down in 5-gallon paint buckets (already treated with potassium metabisulfate), which we then transferred into our primary fermenter. Awesome!

Must was watered down to:

18 gallons must

Brix 23.4
Ph 3.5
Ta 9.3

To that we we added DAP & Leucofood (per last year's measurements), and this year threw Pectic Enzyme (5 teaspoons) into the mix for extra fruit / color extraction.

To our surprise, we returned 12 hours later to add yeast and found out the native yeast had already started fermenting the wine. Hmm, after some research and advice from our mentor that yeast doesn't make all that much of a difference, we decided to let it do its thing; will monitor fermentation closely to avoid a stuck fermentation by ensuring good temperature and nutrients for the yeast.

Now we punch down, this year more aggressively and will err on more punchdowns in a day.