I'm Stephen Cass, the owner of Cass Vineyards and winery in Paso Robles, California.
 
The trick with malolactic fermentation, once you've gone through primary fermentation you pick your yeasts,
throw it in there, seven days later the sugar is gone and you're ready for malolactic (secondary) fermentation.
But the wine is not stable. You want to get through malolactic fermentation as quickly as possible.
That is where the wine converts from having malic acids to lactic acids,
which are smoother and have a creamier feel on your palette.
It's definetly something you want to do with your red wines.  Actually, you want to stop it with your whites.
The bacteria or the yeasts, what ever it is that starts up malolactic fermentation,
Generally speaking you don't have to inoculate
as it's almost always available in nature.  But, it only operates when the wines are in the 65-70 degree temperature range.
So here around Paso as you finish harvest and you get to late October, early November
it starts to get chilly so the wine will stop malolactic fermenation until spring comes around unless you have a warm room where you can put them in.
So if you don't have a warm room, you've got
malolactic fermentation stalled out
and bad things might be happening to your wine.
You can't stablize it because if you stabilize it
you kill off the malolactic fermentation, so you are at risk.  The Kimono is open from a winemaker perspective.
So what we've done and what a lot of people have done who are concerned with making top quality wine is you
set-aside a part of your winery that is really well insulated and throw a few heaters in there
and you take those last
twenty or thirty or forty barrels or
whatever came in near the end of harvest, stick them in the warm room, throw some heaters in there, close the door, and that way you are through
malolactic by late December, early
January. Once you're through malolactic
then you can stabilize it and the wine is safe.  Otherwise you have to wait until April.
And that extra four months sort of hanging out in a cold room, well, you are at risk.
