Well, my carboys are doing well in a "cocoon" of warmth. I folded a couple of electric blankets in half and then wrapped the carboys in the folded over blankets. Then I covered them with a couple of regular blankets to keep the heat in.I set the blanket temp on "medium" and the temps of the carboys were able to maintain 75 degrees with no problems.
The heated garage was already at 60 degrees so it was not much of an increase.
This setup also allowed me to easily access the carboys to stir up the lees and mlf bugs every couple of days. I then purged the oxygen out of the carboy necks with Nitrogen to prevent any potential oxygenation. Looks like I need to upgrade to a larger size nitrogen tank next time. This is using a lot more that I thought... in addition to purging wine bottles and carboys.
Well, here's the Chromatography results. The utmost right column is a test of lactic acid as a reference point. Looks like the St Croix is done (the 2nd from the right column).
The first 7 columns are the Italian juice. Looks like it did not have much malic acid to start with but it still needs a bit more time.
Okay, I guess I'll adjust acid and pH and do a cold stabilization of the St Croix in my new refrigerator ... at about 28 to 30 degrees. I'll "seed" it with a bit of cream of tartar to get things going. So far this wine is looking a lot better than I expected for a hybrid. I'm hoping I will be able to get a TA of about 6+g/l and a pH of about 3.4 after cold stabilization. Not bad for a cold weather hybrid grape wine!
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