Posts

Showing posts from May, 2013

Cold Stabilization

Image
The 2012 Riesling has been fermenting and clearing for six months.  To lower the total acidity (tartaric) a bit and stabilize the wine, I need to ideally drop the temperature of the wine to 32 degrees for two weeks.  There are a few ways this can be done.  The first, a large freezer room, is out of the question for my small winery.  The second option is to place a cooling line in the tanks that runs also through a chiller unit.  Eventually I may build a chiller coil setup, but it would require modification to my tank lids.  The chiller units and coils are also somewhat expensive, with the unit running $1500 to $4500 and the coils another $500 to $1000.  The third option that small time winemakers sometimes employ is to put the tank in an ice bath.  I decided to go with the third option. My tanks are large, four feet tall and 24 inches in diameter.  More importantly, when full, they weigh around 750 pounds.  Lowering one of these tanks into a larger drum is not an option.  I can only