Natural Wine Fermentation with Wild Yeast. Preventing Problems and Making Incredible Wine

[Music] [Music] it's alive today on the home wine making channel we've got a spooky topic to talk about and that is wild fermentation or some might call it spontaneous fermentation if you take some grapes or most any other fruit and crush them into a juice and let that sit at room temperature for a while one way or another a fermentation will start that juice is gonna try to turn into wine the question is is it going to be a good wine or not in a lot of cases it's really not there's a lot of things out there that can ferment in grape juice that being said some really incredible wines can be made by natural fermentation and today what i'll try to cover is some things you can do to de-risk the process [Music] oh hey molly there's a lot of reasons why a wild fermentation like this is really spooky the first being that it just might not start at all you might just let this wine sit here only to find that it just never really gets off the ground and gradually starts to oxidize you always want to kind of have a backup plan be ready to bail if this doesn't get going within about maybe five days you're going to want to pitch your own yeast starter into it and get that thing fired up the other thing that could happen is that it might get started but get started with a really really bad yeast strain in the wild there are thousands of strains of yeast and many many different species a lot of which are just not good for wine at all this book is from the 1950s and is filled with eight well 700 pages of yeast and only one of which is known to ferment well in wine that's saccharomyces cerevise that that species has all of the strains of wine yeast that you would get in a yeast packet so you can do some things to try to improve your chances of saccharomyces cerevisiae or wine yeast being the yeast that ultimately takes over this fermentation this must has been sulfited at the crusher and what that does is kind of stunts back most any wild yeast most wild yeast don't have a good tolerance to sulfur dioxide or so2 but wine yeast does it actually produces it as a kind of a way to be competitive against these other yeast so by adding something like 50 maybe 60 parts per million of free so2 at the crusher you're kind of giving a slight advantage to wine yeast if you think that a bad yeast is fermenting you're probably going to want to add again a yeast starter of one of the most competitive yeast strains you can find something like ec1118 that will out-compete just about anything and you'll notice funky smells and things like really funky smells that would be a time when you say maybe it's time to bail here again something you can do to again kind of de-risk this whole thing is to kind of do a pre-fermentation so if you've got your own vineyard you can pick say five gallons worth of grapes or make you know a small five gallon batch and let that start to ferment a few days ahead of when you actually plan to harvest your grapes and if everything's going well first of all that gives you some confidence that that bigger fermentation will go well but the other thing it does is if that big fermentation doesn't really want to get started you can use that five gallon batch as a giant yeast starter to get everything off the ground most wild yeast really won't take a fermentation past about three or four percent alcohol so there's this huge risk that wild forms of wine yeast never really do take hold so the wine could stall out at say three or four percent so if that happens maybe time to bail add your wine knees you kind of just have to always be watching and be ready for what could go wrong and if you need to bail bail in most cases though wine yeast will be in the line to some extent it's really the minority out there but it doesn't take much one or two little cells could be enough to establish a full fermentation so it's whether it comes from the wild or even just the wild yeast floating around in my basement here because we make a lot of wine it's probably going to get in there somehow and it's probably going to get this fermentation going this particular fermentation lagged for about three days before really any signs of fermentation happened and it also kind of struggled at that three or four percent range and i'll talk about later some things that i did to try to get through that without issue now it's just about done and really it's heading in a really good direction [Music] oh boy [Music] it's been three days and i've since pressed that wine and racked it off the gross leaves which can get a little bit funky especially with a wild fermentation if you don't get that wine off them after you press all in all it took 20 days from me kind of starting this fermentation until i pressed it which is a really really long skin contact time for a red wine and i normally can't get that long if i'm using a more reliable or aggressive yeast strain by inoculating it myself so that really extra long fermentation in combination with this lag time is one reason why this wine could end up a little bit better than something that i might do with a cultivated or cultured yeast and during that lag phase you get somewhat of an enzymatic breakdown in addition to these yeasts and potentially even bacteria breaking down the sugars so again it could make the wine just a little bit more complex we'll find out later as this wine ages the fermentation on this has been i'll say a struggle it has been fighting me all along the way so i've been fighting some hydrogen sulfide so that's that kind of sulfur rotten egg smell that can happen when a yeast gets stressed or a wine gets air starved so i've been really trying to splash that wine up when i punch down i've been putting just a sheet over it to try to give it as much air as possible i've also been feeding the yeast so yeast needs nutrient it needs nitrogen to just reproduce healthily and just ferment in a healthy way so it's not creating these off gases so i use some fermaid k if you want you can use fermaid o if you want to keep this as kind of natural as possible that's an organic yeast nutrient which is really very similar to fermented k and i also use some dap dyamonium phosphate which is basically really really good source of nitrogen but i would say almost too good it's kind of like um giving the yeast giving yourself candy versus a meal but it is helpful if you're trying to quickly kind of fix that hydrogen sulfide issue if you've already kind of detected it i've also been fighting a little bit of ethyl acetate which is that nail polish remover smell it's one form of va or volatile acidity and it can also happen when a yeast gets stressed and it can also be the byproduct of other fermentations happening in parallel whether they're bacterial or just less ideal wild yeast strains so again i'm just trying to air that give that wine air let whatever's fermenting in there be healthy these yeast will produce less esters like that when they are in contact with a little bit more air and well fed and also if they're in a the temperature window that they want to be in wine yeast likes to be in this say 70 to 80 degrees fahrenheit so that's something i did to kind of make things more risk free is warm these this grape must up to about 72 degrees right away a lot of these spoilages like to ferment more around 60 degrees so you give the wine yeast a little bit of a competitive advantage by getting it there i did let it get into the 80s i normally like to get up to about 85 or so for a red wine i let it get there but i didn't let it stay there very long because you could pretty quickly tell that it was stressing that yeast more than i wanted based on the smells that it was producing so this less than perfectly clean fermentation it could again contribute to some more complexity uh in this finished wine it's been a roller coaster of emotions but i think as long as everything is in check i'm not getting a crazy amount of hydrogen sulfide or a crazy amount of ethyl acetate i'm just getting whiffs of it this could again like in the end that little bit of va volatile acidity can create a little bit of a fruitier aroma that little bit of hydrogen sulfide can help bind up anthocyanin our color components it can also help bind up some of these funny off flavors so these can kind of be contributory factors to these big long you know benzene ring type structures in a wine that can contribute to mouth feel texture complexity we don't really know and what i'm going to do is compare this wine to a wine that's from the same grapes the same 80 20 blend and but it's fermented with cultivated cultured yeast so as time goes on i'll be comparing those two wines and you can follow that on my patreon page patreon.com make wine and we'll see which one do i think turned out better i'm certain that the one that was fermented with cultivated yeast will be a good clean wine there's no doubt about that but this one having this microbial oasis all these random things in there that are each creating their own little off flavors it could be pretty interesting i looked at this through a microscope to just try to see if there were odd things in there that were pretty clearly not wine yeast and i did see that there was a pretty complex variety of wild yeast in there um after about five or six days though you saw just all these little round ball looking yeast which is kind of a characteristic look of wine yeast i think we did do that standard thing where once you hit three or four percent alcohol the only thing that can really keep going is wine yeast what's next for this wine well i have racked it off the gross leaves as i said i've splashed it up pretty good which is something you want to do if you are catching little whiffs of hydrogen sulfide and that wine really is still very air hungry at this point so i'm not quite yet afraid of air but i will be soon i've got it into topped up carboys and i'll be adding malolactic bacteria now if you want to go all natural you can try to count on wild malolactic bacteria doing its thing in there but to really count on that you probably should have not sulfited before fermentation and has a little bit more risk than i really wanted to take so i'm choosing a strain of malolactic which is called ch16 it's very reliable and it's going to take this wine through myolactic fermentation i'm also going to start adding oak to the wine i'll probably use medium toast french for the most part we'll see maybe towards the end i'll jump into a little bit of medium plus i like to add that in the form of oak cubes if i'm working in carboys when malolactic fermentation is complete i'm going to go ahead and sulfite this wine it's it's still gonna have any problem that any other wine would have and maybe even a little bit more than other wines would have because i was kind of allowing some of these potential other yeast to kind of establish themselves early on by not throwing a competitive yeast in there to basically out-compete them so i'll sulfite i usually like to give one pretty heavy dose right at the end of malolactic fermentation that'll carry me all the way through aging and then i'll test the free so2 at the time of bottling make any subtle adjustments if needed i can do a couple of things as far as oxygen contact goes during aging i can use rubber stoppers with glass air locks which is going to be about the most oxygen tight container that i can do with a glass carboy but this this one there's a because there's all this kind of complexity i want to provide i kind of want to essentially micro oxidize it like what would happen in a barrel so i'm going to use early on i've got these um silicone stoppers which i'll use for maybe the first 10 days of malolactic fermentation the silicone is not particularly good at blocking air but it's better than something like just covering it with a paper towel next i'm going to transition into normal rubber stoppers but i'm going to use plastic airlocks because i want that tiny tiny bit of air permeability so over the you know 12 to 18 months that this is going to sit in a carboy it's going to get little tiny bits of air not enough that it's going to really oxidize the wine but enough that it'll allow it to kind of mature itself better smooth itself out round out those rough edges that are happening from all these crazy complex you know microbial things but also from that 21 days of skin time 21 days is a long time which means lots of tannin and what rounds out lots of tannin is um lots of not i won't say lots of air but a little bit of air one thing i will mention is i would not try to do what i'm doing here if it's your first time ever making wine maybe don't try to do this i think you want to really have a good handle on how to steer a wine that starts to go a little bit astray on you and one thing that's for sure is these wild fermentations can easily start to go astray also i wouldn't do this on a white wine even just in that lag phase while you're waiting for the fermentation to start that white wine is probably going to turn brown and white wines are just so so delicate the flavors the aromas they're very delicate so by doing this wild fermentation it's just probably gonna completely run over all those nice delicate things that you want in that white wine if you have a lot of experience doing wild fermentations i'd love to hear any suggestions from you in the comments especially if your wine doesn't taste like salad dressing i think there's a lot of wine makers out there that they're very like anti-science and insists that they've got these incredible wines but there's also a lot of wine makers that are basically making glorified vinegar or you know really sherry tasting wines which is maybe not something that we're shooting for for trying to win metals and wine making i hope this video wasn't too spooky for you if you want to help support the home wine making channel check out these awesome hoodies that i've got here you can buy those by clicking on one of the little links in the bar below the video thanks for watching and we'll see you next time

Channel: The Home Winemaking Channel

Views: 16,959

Keywords: Wine, winemaking, home winemaking, winery, Home Wine Making, Wild Fermentation, Spontanious Fermentation, Fermenting without yeast, no yeast, how to, natural wine, natural fermentation, organic, DIY, At home, Petit Verdot, Merlot, Making Merlot, Making Petit Verdot, mead, beer, homemade, home made

Id: qFUkQOWTStU

Length: 18min 24sec (1104 seconds)

Published: Sun Oct 31 2021