At this point, the must has sat overnight, and the sulfur which we added yesterday (see sorting and crushing) has killed off any of the unwanted naturally occurring yeasts that may have been present.  We need to turn to all that grapey sugar into alcohol, which is called fermentation.

The important equation that is necessary to turn grapes into wine:

Sugar + Yeast = Alcohol + CO2

To start the fermentation I went ahead and added the Bourgovin RC 212 yeast packed to some warm water for about 10 minutes and confirmed that the yeast was indeed activated.  Next, I combined the activated yeast water with about a cup of must and mixed that around in a tall pint glass.  Then, I dropped the yeast mixture into the large white plastic garbage can like fermentation container, which I made sure to mix around really well. 

Once again, sit and wait.

There is one necessary activity during this primary fermentation – punching down the cap.  As the wine begins to ferment, the grape skins are pushed to the top of the fermentation container, above the juice.  The technique is actually as simple as pushing the skins back into the juice and mixing it around a little bit. What this accomplishes is 1. providing oxygen to the process, and 2. preventing the skins on the top from growing weird things that might contaminate your soon to be wine.  I found this  part of the process quite fun actually, and enjoyed punching down the cap twice a day and getting my (clean) hands down in there.

During this primary fermentation the only thing that the winemaker can control is the temperature.  We chose to let our wine ferment as fast as it wanted to and tried to keep the air temperature above 70 degrees.  This resulting in the must pushing 83 during the height of fermentation.  Next time, I would probably try to slow this down a little bit and let it take a little longer, which i think would allow more color to be extracted from the grape skins.

This took us about 5 days.

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