Continued Maceration

This morning I made one of the three remaining planned punchdowns on the must. Once again, the Pod's Brix sensor was reading -5° before the punch but returned to a more realistic -2° after mixing. The Provina guys are already working on some mods to the sensor design to help prevent the sensor getting "stuck in the muck" – the heavy lees that settle after fermentation slows.

Late yesterday Vinquiry emailed the results of the malic acid analysis. At this time the wine has 1.01 g/L, which is low compared to average levels – I usually expect somewhere between 2 and 3 g/L in juice. Because of the relatively high level of SO₂ added when I filled the WinePod there is little chance that bacterial activity has dropped the malic level. Anyway, with this amount of malic to be converted to lactic I don't expect the pH to rise much above 3.6 after fermentation.

The aroma of the must has changed dramatically from yesterday, and for the better. Where yesterday there was a little funk today there is just sweet jammy fruit. The cap is mostly down but there is a fraction that is still slightly buyoant – likely from the small amount of CO₂ produced by the malolactic bacteria. Also, there are a couple of handfuls of whole berries that have refused to pop – they are not hard and green so they should release whatever thay have going on in them at this point (likely lots of carbonic maceration) at pressing.