After making the decision to start making wine, we made some investments in our facilities the following day. In addition to good equipment, great ingredients and an over abundance of patience, you also need an ideal space to let your wine come to life. For many people, this might be a closet tucked away in a spare bedroom, it may be a laundry room, a less used bathroom, a garage or a shed. In our case, it’s something a little different. Since we’re not blessed with lots of extra space around the house, or power in our shed, or heat in our garage, I decided to build a temperature controlled, three chambered wine making “rig“. After a couple days construction, testing showed that the heating and cooling system would easily keep the compartments within 3 degrees of their target tempurature.
Once the tests were complete on the tempurature system, our equipment was sanitized, and everything else was prepped and standing by, we actually started our first fermentation for our first wine, a baraolo to be labeled Old Road 54. The process is pretty simple – at a high level you ferment the grape juice by adding yeast to convert sugars into alcohol, and once that’s complete, you let the wine stabilize and clear before barreling or bottling, after which you let it age and build character and flavor. We merely started the first step, adding some basic chemical components to rid the juice of unwanted enzymes, some toasted oak to add barrel flavor without buying a barrel, and wine yeast to chow down on the sugars.
From here we let it sit between 65 and 75 degrees for close to a week, allowing the aggressive portion of the fermentation to complete. Next we’ll rack the wine into a glass carboy and allow the alcohol and acidity levels to normalize. More to follow in a couple weeks when we have some updates on the wine’s progress!
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