Anybody have any experience with cold-shocking Red Star cote des blacs? I'd like to use it in some cider and cold shock to retain some sweetness. Temperatures and duration of successful treatments would be greatly appretiated.
Warren Place
That's a good choice of yeast for what you're trying to do. It ferments slowly, with little foaming, and it stops easily if you chill it to refrigerator temperatures.
Keep it cold until it settles, rack and sulfite it, sterile filter (best) or sorbate it (not as good) to prevent it from starting up again, and bottle it. Alternatively, you could just chill, settle, rack and sulfite it, bottle it and keep all of it in the 'fridge until you drink it.
Tom S
Yes. I successfully stopped a CdB fermentation last year on a late harvest wine by racking into a tank that had sat outside overnight when the ambient temp dropped close to 20F. The tank had been cleaned the prior day and was quite literally frosty that next morning. This tank was considerbly oversized compared to the batch (600 gallon tank for 200 gallons of wine) so there was plenty of surface area to help chill things down. It was a bit dicy but it worked. Fermenting temp was 60F and the shock brought it down to 45F. After the wine temp had stabilized (couple hours) it was racked into a 200 gallon tank. Once it appeared that the fermentation was arrested (a few sweatful days without any action), it was sulfited and fined. Next day after that it was racked and filtered (0.45 micron pad) and then cold stabilized. Before bottling it was sorbated.
clyde
Clyde actually said to filter and sorbate the wine. Not either or. This is what we do also, namely filter with a .45 pad sometime a Millipore also and always sorbate.
Paul
I've found that, if presented with samples blind, I can taste sorbate at the recommended rate *in a reasonably dry wine*. That is, I can taste it in a wine with residual sugar of say 0.5 to 0.9%. In a much sweeter wine, I might not.
Dave
**************************************************************************** Dave Breeden snipped-for-privacy@lightlink.com
The Montelle Seyval mentioned in the following article is a 0.9% RS wine with sorbate added:
Someone didn't mind it being in the wine.
clyde
It seems that a couple days of chilling CdB to 38*F in a cider with 8*Brix wasn't enough to halt fermentation. When I left the wine at 72*F for 3 days, fermentation was very active. To continue the experiment to determine the cod tolerance of this supposedly cold-sensitive yeast, I froze the cider for 24 hours. I'll let you know if it completes the ferment after it thaws. As this thread has repeated announced, cold-shocking CdB isn't a dependable method to halt fermentation.
Warren Place
I don't really think you should need to add sorbate to a "dry" wine. Sorbate's entire existance is to prevent yeast reproduction in a "sweet" wine. Adding it to a dry wine is futile.
Simply getting the wine cold is not the complete process of cold shocking. The idea is to make the yeast momentarily inactive to facilitate removing them. It's key to get the bulk of the yeast away from the wine early (first racking), and then to remove the rest of the yeast within a short period of time (fining, racking, filtering). As long as yeast and sugar are present, there will always be a chance of refermentation.
I have made wine with ideal equipment before, and we would stop the fermentation by lowering the wine to about 24F with refrigerated tanks (this would take about 48 hours with ~6k tanks), then centrifuging the wine to remove the bulk of the yeast, and then maintaining a 24F temperature until the wine was filtered and bottled.
clyde
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