How to Control Your Wine Fermentation Temperature – WMA009

Fermentation tank with a glycol chilling system.
A glycol cooled fermentation tank.

The temperature of your wine fermentation plays a big role in how your final product will turn out. If it gets too hot or too cold things you can end up with flavor issues, or worse, a stuck fermentation.

In this podcast you’ll discover a few different ways of heating and cooling a fermenting wine to ensure that you maintain the proper temperature. There are simple and inexpensive methods and then, of course, there are most costly methods that can sometimes offer better temperature control.

Listener Questions

Here is the lineup of listener questions addressed in this show:

  1. How do you use inert gases to sparge a carboy?
  2. I accidentally added too much potassium metabisulfite. What do I do now?
  3. How many days do you keep the grape skins on the must during fermentation?
  4. Can oak cubes or spirals be used more than once?
  5. I won’t be home to rack my wine to the secondary fermenter. Is this a problem?

Resources Mentioned

The following articles were mentioned throughout the podcast.

*DO NOT use copper coils as the pH of wine is strong enough to cause more copper to disperse into your wine which can become a health hazard.