This morning, I woke up early and thought to myself, “Wine!” Well, that was after I recalled the strange and vivid dream I had while sleeping. After making myself some coffee, going through email, I checked and realized that it was about time to stabilize the batch of Pinot Noir.

I could have done it last week, but that is the nice thing about home winemaking. You don’t have to keep a rigid schedule. Wine doesn’t care if a week or more goes by after when you could have done something. It’s still fine, sitting there.

Stabilization is the stage where the goal is to stop the yeast from reproducing new cells. You aren’t really killing the remaining yeast cells- but are stopping them from producing more, and causing them to be inactive.

I also like to rack the wine at this stage as well, to get it up off the lees. It seems to me that by doing this, it also helps to clear the wine a wee bit faster of live yeast cells that may be in the lees. I may be incorrect though.

What I do is rack the wine into a primary fermenter, and then add sulphite and potassium sorbate. You need these two ingredients together in order to accomplish the task. Then, I stir vigorously.

After the secondary is cleaned up, I rack the wine back into the secondary from the primary fermenter. While this is going on, I added the Isinglass to a half cup of water to let it hydrate. Isinglass is a “fining” agent, which I’ll write more about later. After the wine has been racked into the primary, I add the water and Isinglass and stir vigorously. Or as I did this morning, used my Fizz-X tool to stir.

The carboy then has the airlock replaced, and it goes back up on the counter, to wait as time passes for another couple of weeks while the wine is clearing.

And while it’s doing that, I can blog, work, play, drink other wine, or anything else I please!

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