Fire!

My building had a fire tonight. While wasting time listening to Falco and playing Scramble I noticed a ring in the background. To make a long story short the hallway was blanketed in smoke and I hightailed it out of there. Luckily I thought to grab a jacket because it was 3 degrees Celsius outside. During the 1.5 hours or so I was not able to go into my building I made a trip to Wal Mart.

This relates to wine because I bought the longest potato masher that I could find in order to perform 4 times-daily punchdowns on my Carmenere. The point of this is to extract more color and tannin and perhaps flavor from the skins. The fermentation pushes them all to the top with CO2, and the punchdowns just mix them back in with the juice. It's good news that a nice "cap" is regularly forming and it appears that fermentation is going quite well so far. The juice was at 21.5 brix this afternoon, which puts the wine at about 1% alcohol so far, although probably higher 10 hours later. It's also heating up a bit and appears to be around 75 degrees Fahrenheit. If it gets up much higher I may have to figure out how to cool it down, but it's well within range right now.

For now I'm going to attempt to sleep in a smokey apartment, and if this is the last post ever for this blog, perhaps the air quality was not good enough to be let back in yet, and someone should probably tell the authorities that everyone in the building is dead.