Wednesday, May 11 2011

The Only Vacuum is Between My Ears

Does anyone hear an echo in here?

Did you ever do something that at the time seemed innocuous, yet later came back to haunt you as a trainwreck of your judgement? Sure, that happens to all of us--a simple lark or a careless statement that goes sideways on you and you wind up backfilling and apologising and trying to mitigate the effects for a much longer time than the original event took to pass? Sometimes it's an easy trap you could have avoided ("Yes, those pants do make your butt look big") but others are much more subtle, where you don't even know you've opened a can of worms until it's all red wigglers all the time.

Man, the Chef Boy-Ar-Dee has seen better days

It's much worse in print, and super-ultra worse on the internet, because in print your words are there in black and white, un-nuanced and easily read by folks who may not have the same agenda as you, and on the internet all time-lines compress: something you wrote 15 years ago (yes, I've been internetty that long) is as fresh and snappy as the day you wrote it, no matter how much your understanding of your topic has improved, or what your  intent was all those years ago.

So what is my foible? What pecadillo is back to haunt me? Whose cornflakes have I curdled?

It all happened in a vacuum.

Electrically powered troublemaker, I regret ever meeting you in that morgue.

I wanted to address the number of inquiries I was getting from winemaking forum members and folks emailing me regarding the use of vacuum pumps to degas wine. Some home consumer winemakers apply a vacuum to their carboys in order to pull dissolved carbon dioxide gas out of their wine. There are a number of reasons why wine might have dissolved gas in it after the specified fermentation period, but they all boil down to one single, over-arching reason: someone didn't follow the instructions.

The gas is real enough, all right, but if you actually make wine kits to spec, they only need a vigorous stir to get out all of the gas in solution. But heck, I use shortcuts sometimes, and once I even pulled off the tag from the mattress that said, 'DO NOT REMOVE' (still waiting for them to kick down my door and drag me away on that one) so I thought I'd explore the topic from a home user's viewpoint. I wrote an article and therein was the genesis of increased interest in vacuum degassing for kit wines. I knew pretty much right away that the article was going to come back to haunt me, and I was right: inquiries about vacuum pumps increased.

Eventually I followed the article up with a blog post for Winemaker Magazine, where I tried to downplay vacuum degassing. To quote myself from Winemaker:

Back in 2007 I wrote an article that mentioned vacuum degassing. No good deed goes unpunished, and this apparently singled me out for some serious punishing. I've always been sorry I mentioned it.

Not because it's necessarily an invalid technique, just that the idea seems to inspire folks to use vacuum degassing as a first-resort in getting the bubbles out of their kit wines. And that's nobody's fault but mine. After all, I wrote:

However, there are some folks who don’t have as much success with stirring as a kit manufacturer might hope. If you are one of the people having problems chasing the last of the bubbles out of your batch, there is another path you can take: vacuum degassing.

I should have written,

'Problems with gas saturation are always indicative of a flaw in your wine kit processing, and in 90% of the cases (tracked through my database over 17 years) that flaw is due to temperature: either your kit started too cold, was fermented too cold, or suffered local fluctuations in temperature. In any of these cases you need to go back and remedy your upstream processing rather than relying on a vacuum pump to get the snap-crackle-pop out of your Chardonnay'

But I didn't, because I was having too much fun with my vacuum pump, a used cannular evacuation pump I got from a mortician. My enthusiasm spilled over, and ever since then I've tried to avoid even the mention of vacuum pumps.

But that wasn't enough. Nope, the whole vacuum thingy keeps sucking me in (har de har) and while I've learned to live with it. But last month at the Fermenter's Guild of British Columbia meeting and the week after at the Fermenter's Guild of Ontario meeting people were telling me how pleased they were that I was now endorsing vacuum degassing for On-Premise winemaking.

This was news to me. In every interaction I've had with Wine On Premise operators, I've dismissed vacuum degassing as an unnecessary step, a bad business move (add labour to a process that doesn't require it? Don't think so) and a sign that there were  problems with processing. To put it succinctly, dissolved CO2 is a symptom, not a real problem.

Cleans drains a treat

To state it even more clearly: the use of vacuum degassing in an on-premise operation is an acknowledgement that you're doing it wrong. It's an admission of failure. When something doesn't work in a business the solution isn't to band-aid it in a way that costs you money and time, the solution is to correct the problem that lead to the breakdown. It's simple enough to rectify by altering processing schedules and tightening temperature control of must and fermentation areas. Throw in a few appropriate tools (a drill-mounted wine whip and a good thermometer) and gas problems disappear.

The thing that's got me concerned enough to blog about this is that there's a company out there selling vacuum systems that's using a link to my original article in their literature. Fair enough, quoting what I wrote in the public domain is fine. The trouble being, they've taken something I wrote for home users experimenting with funny little techniques and applied it to businesses that simply don't have the resources to spare to fiddle with post-processing band-aids. Worse, they've told some people directly that I endorse their vacuum system, which is news to me.

Thankfully I've got a venue where I can set the record straight. If you're a home user there's nothing really wrong with using a vacuum degassing system on your wine if you're in an all-fired hurry to get your wine stable enough for bottling, and for the next wine you make you can have a look at the temperature of the must before you pitch the yeast (22-24°C, 72-75°F) and the temperature of your fermenting area (stable at as close to 22°C/72°F as you can get) and you shouldn't have gas problems again (in your wine at least). If you're a wine on premise operator, you can use it if you want, but none of the wine kits available today are designed for use with a vacuum system, and such systems add processing steps, time, and money to your busy schedule.

For me the take-away lesson is this: the best laid plans of mice and men aft gang aglay, and try though I might, I'm going to have to get used to getting bitten on the butt by stuff I've written, no matter how I try to keep things clear.

Posted by Bubblehead Tim AT 10:18AM

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