Electric blankets at the ready!

Cosy times in production

I came to work one morning earlier this week to find two king sized electric blankets in our production area. Ahhh my boss is good to me,nice place to snooze when I need a little nap after a hard mornings graft.....wrong!!

This is an innovative method and if it works vastly cheaper than the industry offerings to try and gently warm the steel tanks where fermentation is stuck,meaning that there is still sugar remaining which we need the yeast to convert to alcohol so that we can maximise the alcohol content,especially important in our young wines as I am sure you will all agree :) 

So we have wrapped them up nice and cosy,whacked them up to maximum power and covered them with reflective blankets to try and retain maximum heat rather than warming up the entire shed!   We are now monitoring progress which is gradual as we are having to warm getting on for 1000 litres, but having tasted a couple of days ago there is a little prickle on the tongue which indicates that fermentation could be starting up again -so fingers crossed that it is mission accomplished.

Stage 1

And finished off with the reflective covering

More and more I am learning that many of the practical aspects of wine making in a small scale winery such as this is down to thinking outside the box and using what you have around you in clever ways rather than investing thousands of pounds in specialised equipment. I am sure there will be many more instances of using everyday things to obtain a desired effect.