wine update

Its been quite a while since I've done any homemade wine updates. Thats because nothing new has been going on. Partly out of laziness and partly out of lack of time, I haven't done anything to the wine in a long time. Its just been sitting in the secondary fermenter. However, I did just recently put some clarifying agents in the wine. I used a combination of two different substances. One is Chitosan, the other is colloidal sililca. These two attract suspended particles and end up precipitating out. After about 2 days time, the wine looks much clearer. I wish I had taken a picture just before putting the clarifying stuff in. The difference is quite impressive. This is what it looks like after the clarifying agents:

After giving it a few days to settle out, I racked the wine off the sediment, rinsed out the secondary fermenter, and then put the wine back into it. The next step is to do the cold stabilization. This should precipitate out some additional acid salts and make sure that nothing precipitates out while in the bottle. This should also reduce the acidity a bit. Don't worry, though. When I did the initial calculations for how much acid to reduce, I did take into consideration that I would be doing the cold stabilization. I have a chest freezer in the basement that I was hoping to put the wine in for the cold stabilization, but at the warmest setting, the thermometer I put in reads about +1.5 degrees F. Way too cold. The wine would probably freeze at that temperature. Supposedly around 25 degrees is ideal. So the wine is now sitting in my garage. It should stay around 30-40 in there. I'll leave it there for at least a week, then it will be ready to bottle!!