I checked my Piazza yesterday at lunch time. It was fermenting vigorously. My daughter is complaining about the fermentation smell throughout the house. The fermentation has proceeded faster than I anticipated. ICV-D47 is supposed to be a slower fermenting yeast than EC-1118 but this one seems to be racing to the finish. I didn’t check the hydrometer reading yesterday but I knew from experience that this wine had reached at least it’s half way point so I added the second dose of nutrients as recommended by Lallemand in their Fermaid-K fact sheet. I didn’t have any Fermaid on hand so I added a half teaspoon of yeast nutrient instead. I then gave it a good stir. I’ve been stirring my wine at least three times a day since the fermentation began. My reason for doing this is to help keep the yeast and bentonite in suspension. I’m hoping that it will help to ferment the maximum amount of sugar leaving the finished wine with very little residual sweetness. It’s common practice to stir wine in large commercial tanks but I don’t know if it will make much difference in a small 23 litre batch. We’ll see.
I just checked the specific gravity of my wine. It is at 1.020. That’s lower than I expected. Maybe it’s because of the extra yeast and stirring I’ve been doing. The temperature has dropped slightly to 18ยบ Celsius. That’s 2 degrees lower than it was yesterday. The optimum temperature for the yeast I’m using is between 15 and 20 degrees Celsius so I’m in good shape but I’ll have to keep an eye on it and make sure it doesn’t drop too low.
My Piazza is coming to the end of its primary fermentation and I’ll soon be transferring it to a carboy. It’s time to starting thinking about my second wine which I will be putting on this weekend. Calls for snow so it should be a good winemaking weekend.
