Primary fermentation length - Is 2 weeks OK? - Affects?

What kind of wine are you making? It might make a difference. When I make red grape wine I like to leave it on the skins for 3 weeks. But with fruit wines like less than 10 days. But wine is very forgiving.

I assume you are able to punch it down a couple of times a day and you are not just leaving it on it's own. That would not be good.

Ray

Two weeks with no stirring or punching down of the cap would worry me, I guess. I'd be afraid of finding mold growing on the top of the cap. If you can manage to stir the solids back into the must (punch down the cap) every couple of days, and keep the whole thing fairly tightly sealed, I guess you could go two weeks. If the initial rapid fermentation phase has stopped before the end of the two weeks (as seems likely), you would want to add some potassium metabisulphite to discourage oxidation. You might end up with a bit more color and tannin extraction than you want, but I doubt the wine would spoil in that length of time.

Doug

Wine's funny. It needs to be ignored every day! ;)

Most of those days you'll just push down the cap, and verify that it's still fermenting.

Primary fermentation won't be over until the cap sinks, or the specific gravity drops below 1.0 (Sugar + water equals gravity of 1.0+, water is

1.0, and alcohol is 1.0-) You won't know when that is until you noticibly see that the fermentation has slowed down, and then you'll want to take specific gravity readings every day or two to know when to rack, top off, and airlock.

Like others have said, if you can't get to pressing, it's probably ok, but it's really important to break up and push dow the must every day or all sorts of bad things can start growing on it, and ruin your wine.

Cheers, Will

p.s. I'm just making my first batch this year, so I'm making this up as I go along! :p

Actually, an extended maceration will probably lighten the colour somewhat, although there will certainly be more tannin! I believe the reason this happens is that the higher tannin levels cause some of the colour particles to precipitate.