A little over one year ago, we started carrying the Mosti Mondiale products.  We began with only the 23 liter Original All Juice buckets, but have since added the complete line of their products.  During this year, we have made over 40 of the Mosti products and received a great deal of feedback from our wonderful customers.  There have been a few problem batches, but for the most part, the feedback is that the Mosti products make outstanding wines.  At our last home wine making club meeting, my 1 year old Original All Juice Sauvignon Blanc came in second out of 6 wines.  It lost to a $19.00 commercial bottle, but beat out 3 commercial wines!

Most of the questions regarding the Mosti wines is why are the instructions different and is the additional aging time that beneficial.  Next month, I plan to discuss aging, both in the carboy and the bottle, but for the time being, I will say that based on personal experience, allowing the Mosti 16- liter kits and All Juice kits to bottle age for 6 months is well worth the patience.

As to the difference in instructions, the one I would like to discuss this month is the first racking.  The Mosti instructions tell you to rack "When the gravity is 1.040 or less (approximately day 6), complete a first racking by siphoning the wine, including sediments, into a clean, sterile carboy."  For those of you that have made a Winexpert kit, this instruction seems odd since Winexpert wants to you leave most of the sediment behind.  In addition, Mosti is telling you to rack earlier at 1.040 instead of the 1.010 in the Winexpert instructions.  I would also like to point out that you should always determine when to perform this racking based on the specific gravity reading, not the number of the days.  The estimated days is more to help you plan your rackings, not when to rack.

So the question is why and is there a real benefit?  The reason for the earlier racking and for the transfer of sediment is to make sure you get a complete fermentation and no off-smells.  As you know, you start out with only 300,000 yeast cells, but during fermentation, the yeast will multiply into 300,000,000 cells.  In order for the yeast to multiply, they need oxygen and food (nutrients) and you don't want just any yeast, you want strong healthy yeasts to make sure they do their job.  At this stage you are usually at the 5^th generation of yeast and nitrogen and oxygen they are really important to create a fully functional membrane to exchange sugar and alcohol. To be more precise, you need them to stimulate the creation of sterol.

To make sure the last generations of yeast are as healthy as the first, we need to make sure there is plenty of oxygen and nutrients in the wine.  You obtain the oxygen from the racking and the nutrients from the transfer of the sediment.  You want the sediment, and you want to suspend the sediment because most of the yeasts are there!  In addition, the solids that have settled from the wine, also include dead yeast cells.  These dead cells, called hulls, provide excellent food for the yeast.  In fact, if you have ever read the label on the yeast energizer, you will have noticed that this product includes "yeast hulls".  Dead yeast cells are important for the ability to absorb unhealthy molecules created during the fermentation.

Mosti is so concerned with this step that they are starting to add a packet of nutrients for you to add during the first racking for all of their 10-liter and larger wine kits.  Some of you may have already received a product with the new instructions and you may or may not have received the nutrient.  It seems the new instructions were used with the remaining additive packs.  If you did not receive the packet with your kit, there is no need to be concerned.  Just follow the instructions by racking timely and transferring the sediment.  The extra packet of nutrients is has been added as insurance to make sure your yeast has plenty of food to continue to ferment all of the sugars.

Please note as well that the clarifiers used by Mosti, Siligel and Liqigel, do not require the sediment like the clarifiers used by Winexpert.  Consequently, you will perform the second racking before you add the stabilizers and fining agents.  It is also very important to get rid of the sediment when it is no longer needed for the fermentation.  The sediment may contain some yeast that not died but are going under stress. Leaving these dying yeast cells in too long can lead to the formation of H2S and related smell which can be very difficult to remove.

As you can see, it is extremely important that your last generations of yeast are just as strong and viable as the first generations.  To be certain this happens, you need to rack at 1.040 and transfer the sediment to make sure your yeast has plenty of oxygen and nutrients to continue to multiply.

Next month we will discuss the benefits of bottle aging and carboy aging and the differences.