Malolactic Fermentation

Warming the wine... Well, yes, that is what we decided to do last week. While talking to the enologist and tasting through all of the different vats of wine, we came to the conclusion, that if we want to bottle any of the wine in the spring, we'll have to warm it a bit so that the malo-lactic fermentation will finish. None of the vats have completed the malo-lactic fermentation, a process which is absolutely necessary before bottling. This winter has been exceptionally cold here in southern France with temperatures dipping well below zero in mid-November. Since we don't yet have doors on the winery, the wine also dipped quite low, 3 degrees Celsius to be exact! At that temperature, nothing is going to happen. So together with the enologist we decided to try to gently heat the wine up in hopes that the "malo" as we call it for short, would kick in and finish. The biggest question was, how exactly could we accomplish this. The first idea we had was to try to rig up the radiator-like apparatus that we used during harvest to cool the wine to the house boiler so that we could circulate super hot water through it. This would have entailed trying to add another "radiator" to our heating system and was quickly abandoned due to the need for meters and meters of insulated hose. The only other option that wouldn't have cost us thousands of euros, was to borrow a heating unit very similar to those travel water heaters that you stick in a mug to boil water for coffee or tea when you're on the road. This seemed like an "ok" idea so we went to see the mayor of our village who also has a winery and is very well equipped to see if he had one that we could borrow. Indeed he did! He happily loaned it to us, so off we went. We let it sit in the winery for a couple of days, neither one of us very eager to stick this thing in our wine. You can imagine how hot a thing like that has to get in order to heat 400 liters of wine. I kept thinking, "How is this going to change the flavor of our wine, and is this really the best thing for us to do." Matt, my genius husband, was luckily thinking the same thing, and came up with an alternative plan... What if we stuck the heating unit in the water of the milk tank that we used to chill the water during harvest, once the water is hot enough we use a submersible pump to circulate the water through the panels that we used to chill the wine during harvest! Brilliant! He came up with the perfect solution! This way we could very gently warm up the wine. We started at 5 degrees last Wednesday, slowly heated it to 18 degrees and we are now trying to maintain it until the malo is finished. We have already seen the results! There are fine little bubbles on the tops of the vats and every once-in-awhile, several bubbles escape from below the surface of the wine and make a wonderful "gloog, gloog" sound! Yeah Matt!!!!!