Cabernet Franc Fermentation

After our friends helped us with crushing our Cabernet Sauvignon and Cabernet Franc, we put the crushed grapes into 30 gallon plastic barrels overnight to extract some color (anthocyanins). We tested the juice from both of the varieties:

Due to the low Brix in the Cabernet Sauvignon, we decided to turn that into a rosé. We had about 6 gallons of juice and we inoculated it with VIN13. For the Cabernet Franc, although the flavors and the Brix were on the raggedy edge of being acceptable to ferment, we decided to try our hand at making a red wine from the destemmed and crushed grapes. After consultation with some friends in the business, we decided to ferment the Cabernet Franc using the yeast F15. F15 is a yeast can yield fruity and round, aromatic wines. The yeast also produces glycerol which can lead to wines with a good mouthfeel. When we began rehydrating the yeast, the smell was slightly earthy and a little offensive. We inoculated the Cabernet Franc on October 22 and decided to put a plant seed starter warming pad on the bottom of the plastic barrel on October 24 to warm the must. The seed starter warming pad is at just the right temperature, between 70 and 98 degrees F.

The heating pad was just the ticket! The must was not too cold and not too hot and yielded this fermentation kinetics graph of the Brix (y-axis) versus date (x-axis):

All told the fermentation lasted 5 days. We put the grapes into the mash bags and extracted the wine into a 7 gallon keg. We may have about 5 gallons of wine which we will rack in the coming days into the appropriate 5 gallon keg. Since we don't have oak barrels, our wine will not have the oaky flavor.