What is Peter up to?
It looks like he is stirring up a cauldron of magic and toad's toes, but he is actually beginning a cold soak. A cold soak is when you let the juice and skins sit and put off fermentation in order to allow the juice to extract crucial flavors from the skins before fermentation begins. This is the next step in the process after running the grapes through the crusher/destemmer that you saw in our last post. In order to keep the temperature down and keep imminent fermentation at bay, we add dry ice to our must (juice, stems, skins, and seeds altogether). In addition to keeping the must from heating up and fermenting, the dry ice also imparts a Co2 layer that helps protect the must and keep it from oxidizing. So next time you look at the pictures with this post and ask yourself "Co2 or Witches Brew?" maybe it's a little bit of both!
