How to Ferment Wines

Video Transcript

"I'm Tish Cooper and I'm Amanda Persico for expertvillage.com at Joseph Filippi Winery and we're going to talk today about some wine selections. It takes about a week and a half for the fermentation to complete. At that point, we've been pumping it over all the time to keep oxygen in with the yeast, the aerobic organisms, they need the air. After that two weeks we send it to the press, press the skins and the seeds away from the juice. The juice goes back to the tank, the stems and the seeds go to a dairy for food. When it goes back to the tank then we can test all the components of the wine. Typically we'll add some analactic bacteria to convert that malic acid into lactic acid, give it more of a buttery component, even with red wine, you don't think butter but, it's a texture, it's a mouth feel. It adds body to the wine, so if you see that on the back label, that it has a, even a partial malolactic fermentation, that can be a positive thing for mouth feel. Sometimes it's not necessary and so we don't do that. After a secondary fermentation then we add a little bit of sulfur to kill any of the bacteria that was in there, positive and negative bacteria, both, we don't want to hurt anyone, we don't want to make anybody sick, so a little bit of sulfur, as little as possible, is a positive thing."