If my readers are anything like the publisher of Winemaker, they're probably wondering to themselves, ‘Hey I wonder when Tim is going to continue that thing in his blog about improving wine kits?' Fortunately for me at least they're not phoning me or sending little emails asking if I'm in jail or if my fingers fell off so I couldn't type. Hi boss!

But wonder no more! It's a project I'm very interested in because it's a rare opportunity to go back and paper over my mistakes clarify some of the things I said in my original article. Ever since it appeared in Winemaker in Summer of 2001 I've heard more about it than any other article I've written (well, except for the mail I keep getting from plant geneticists and Ampelographers about how I misidentified the parent grapes of Chardonnay. Who knew geneticists carried grudges, much less handguns?) so hoop-la, let's continue.

Whipping It Good

Stirring is a Big Deal with kit winemaking, both at the beginning and on fining and stabilising day. Very aggressive stirring is one of the procedural steps modified to accommodate kit winemaking to the extreme brevity of the usual 4/6/8 week production schedule. We'll deal with stirring at the beginning, and handle stirring for fining on another day.

Mixing It Up

First, unless you buy your kits in a single-strength, full-sized format-either 3 or 6 US-gallons (11.5 or 23 litres) in the box-they need a water addition, and that means stirring them to mix. (Even if you do buy single-strength kits they still need stirring-more below). Water and grape juice concentrate do not play well together. While they're not as bad as oil and water, it takes a serious amount of effort to get them to blend evenly. A lot of beginning winemakers pour their water addition into the primary and after a quick peek it looks mixed.

But it isn't. It's lying there in layers, snickering at you. The top is weak and watery like herbal tea, the middle is normal and balanced like a decent cuppa, and the bottom is like that sticky, opaque brown tea your loopy Aunt Griselda used to make with nine teabags and eleven sugars. Leave it like that and even if it does start fermenting you're looking at a blend of three wines, one weak, one normal and one under-fermented and sticky.

The solution is to stir, and stir hard. And that brings us to the other thing about stirring: the kit instructions are lying to you, or at least seriously misinforming you of their intent. Nobody really wants you to ‘stir' anything. They want you to agitate the wine. Stirring is what Auntie Griselda did to get that sugar dissolved in her tea. Agitating is what you do to get a can of paint mixed. And agitate you must, stirring until your elbows creak, your biceps swell like exploding cantaloupes, your shoulders burn with fatigue, and your spoon starts leaving trails of Cherenkov radiation around the fermenter.

Why so darn hard? In addition to mixing the concentrate and water, kit manufactures want you to stir the must for another purpose (this is the other reason mentioned above). That purpose is love. Technically it's asexual reproduction, but even yeast cells deserve a shot at love, even if it's self-love.

L'amour de Levure

It comes to this: the yeast cells you pitch into the must isn't the yeast that makes the luscious alcohol and bubbly carbon dioxide. The first generation of yeast goes to work and settles down to raise kids-hundreds of billions of kids. This is the anabolic, or growth phase of the yeast's life cycle. Until the density of yeast reaches 10-12 million live cells per millilitre of juice, they do nothing but eat and breed (yeast might not be sentient, but they don't sound stupid.)

But breeding takes resources. Yeast can take their nutrients from trace elements and Yeast Available Nitrogen (YAN) contained in the must, or they can get a boost from synthesizing new daughter cells by the uptake of free oxygen in the must. Oxygenated musts start fermenting a lot faster, and usually ferment a lot more thoroughly than un-oxygenated ones. Normally this isn't an issue with freshly pressed grapes, which get a bit of aeration from the crusher and the press, but wine kits go through a pasteuriser, which removes almost all of the gas from suspension, including oxygen. So you must whip it-whip it good-in order to spur on the libido of the yeast.

Whipping it Out

So, let's talk about implements. The humble spoon does indeed do a fine job of stirring, as long as it's made out of impermeable plastic (if it's a spoon, presumably it's food-grade already) or stainless steel, and as long as you wield it with the brutal efficiency of a Samurai warrior going for a men-uchi.
Much better are one of any number of stirring ‘whips' that are available from your local home winemaking shop. Most are variants of a plastic rod with folding wings or little whips sticking out of the business end and the uh . . . non-business end fits into your drill. Pop it into the chuck, tighten it down, sanitise the working bits, poke it into your primary fermenter and pull the trigger.

Of course, if you're a very clever person, you might just work up a stirring device on your own . . .