Truffle Pig Wine

Fermentation is complete, and it's had a week or so of zero-degree weather to settle, so I racked it today.

I racked the wine from the 20L fermentation carboy to a 11.9L carboy that I'll use for aging. There was 375mL of wine left over, which went in a split and then in the fridge.

I added 50ppm SO2 (11.5ml) into the bottom of the smaller carboy before racking the wine into it.

Once the wine was racked, I put the carboy back out into the cold. This should continue to help cold stabilize, as well as kill any yeast that may still be active.

19.5°B @ 68°F (20°C)

I'd love to let this go down another 1 brix, but the weather is telling me to stop it now, so I will. We only have a few more days of sub-zero temperatures during this cold snap, and I need to take advantage of all I get in order to stop fermentation.

24°B @ 64°F (17.5°C)

26°B @ 62°F (16.5°C)

27.5°B @ 62°F (16.5°C)

29.5°B @ 62°F (16.5°C)

31°B @ 60°F (15.5°C)

34°B @ 64°F (17.5°C)

Now that the fermentation is starting to register on the hydrometer, I'm going to start chilling down the container so that it ferments around 15°C

35°B @ 60°F (15.5°C)

An air bubble is now pushing through the airlock at a rate of about 10/minute, so fermentation has definitely started, even though it's not showing up on the hydrometer. That's cool -- as long as it's going, I don't mind if it starts slowly.

35°B @ 60°F (15.5°C)

Still not much visible progress on fermentation. The Neufeld Vidal I fermented this year with 1118 took 4 days to really get going, so it should start to go in earnest around now.

35°B @58.5°F @ midnight

It doesn't seem to be fermenting yet, there are no big fermentation-style bubbles yet. But there is a layer of soapy-looking foam sitting on the top of juice, and the graduated cylinder-worth of juice I pulled definitely had little tiny bubbles in it.

Following the advice of some research done at Brock University, I inoculated the 13L of Riesling-Traminer Icewine juice this evening with 6.5 grams of 1118 yeast (and 6.5 grams of GoFerm). The temperature of the juice was high, around 64°F, so it shouldn't take long for the lot to get going.

A few hours after inoculation I started cooling down the must. I'm going to aim to ferment this batch at around 55°F (12°C).

Before inoculation I made an addition of 26g of Tartaric Acid. There's 13L of juice, so that will raise TA by 2g/L. I may have to make another adjustment once fermentation is complete, but I'll adjust that to taste, not based on any numbers.