So sorry to hear you had a bad year with the powdery mildew. Many growers in California were challenged by 2011, as the cooler weather left lots of us battling botrytis, rot and mildew in many areas of the state. I would suggest you go ahead and get your wine in the barrel now, even though it may not be completely through MLF or the MLF hasn’t started to take off yet. You want to make sure your wine is protected from air in the long run, especially if you don’t hear little carbon dioxide bubbles popping up yet. First of all, you should see if your wine is through MLF already. Sometimes that happens with reds, that a native MLF strain will ferment concurrently with the yeast. If you have inoculated for ML and you haven’t had any signs that it’s active (usually you can hear or even taste little bubbles on your tongue within a week or two of inoculating) I would send a sample to your favorite wine lab of choice to get it checked out. I’d
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