Native Fermentation: Our Pinot Hits 92.3F!

After we launched the blog I decided to catch up on some reading and came across this interesting post over at Pinotblogger. It was the following snippet in reference to native fermentation that really caught my eye:

“According to Morgan there was a heart-attack inducing 2-day lag before the yeast took off, and when it did take off, it really took off. Fermentation temps quickly reached into the 90s and Morgan had to swiftly add dry ice to cool things off so the potentially heat-sensitive yeast didn’t end up killing themselves. The whole thing was hot and quick, finishing up in 3 or 4 days.”

My immediate reaction after reading this was similar to what you might expect to see from someone who just witnessed a bone crunching tackle in football—there was a wince, a pursing of the lips, and a slow ooooooh. I was starting to question whether our decision to go native with our wines was the right one, particularly for our first vintage, one you kinda don’t want to screw up! Then I took a look at our fermentation charts. Our Alder Springs Chardonnay had been fermenting nicely for two weeks without any problems and our Hein Pinot, after just two days, looked pretty good, too. Decision validated.

So I thought!

You can see from the chart below that something explosive happened to our wine on day four of the ferment. In the words of our consulting winemaker at Crushpad, Chris Nelson, “It just took off!” When I talked with him he said that they had put our bin in the cold room and were using dry ice to try and control things. He also said that David Dain, owner of Dain Wines, was keeping an eye on it throughout the night for us.

Click graph for larger version

So I emailed Casey and told her to check the fermentation charts ASAP. As I awaited her response, I kept repeating to myself…ferment to dryness, ferment to dryness, PLEASE ferment to dryness! I also emailed David to tell him thanks for tending to our wine. The next day he writes back to tell us that our wine is (thankfully) approaching dryness and will be pressed soon. Then, an hour later I get this chestnut from him:

Just put you into a nice sweet smelling zebra!!

Good to go, let 'er purr away doing malic, then sleeeep... :)

What a way to get our first wine into barrel--five days and it was over! We knew things could be unpredictable when we decided in our wine plan to go with a natural ferment and those little yeast cells certainly delivered! Overall, I think we'll end up with some really interesting juice, if not, we still have a good story to tell!

I'll be providing details of the winemaking plans we put together for both our wines in a future post so stay tuned...

Jeremy

Comments

[Morgan Twain-Peterson]

Hey Jeremy,

Nice looking blog! Interesting that your Pinot and mine did tend to do the same thing with the wild-yeast fermentation. That said, I still stick by the technique as everything I did this year at bedrock was wild yeast and I had no problems-- the Old Lakeville Syrah fermented dry to 16.4 alcohol (which is higher than I would like, but impressive yeast wise). I think it is just something about Pinot that has a "rocket take-off" in the middle of fermentation. I think warmer ambient temperatures also contributed (I ferment outside). Hope things turn-out well!
-Morgan

[Jeremy]

Thanks Morgan,

Things were a little exciting there for a couple of days that's for sure, especially since we were watching everything unfold online via the fermentation graphs. I read your post the day before our wine went from 20 to 5 brix. I wouldn't hesitate to go the natural route next time around at all--I'm a "believer".

What's interesting though is that I'm still a little unclear on what it really means to ferment "naturally" when your in a custom crush facility with literally hundreds of other wines being made and all kinds of yeast flying around. This wasn't that big of an issue this year since Crushpad is making wines in their newly built facility. This is something I'm going to have to do some more research on. Your outdoor setup sounds pretty cool though.