Help help help!

[Szbeylik]

For the first time in my life, I’m trying to make wine out of plum juice I have pressed myself from our plum tree.
Everything seemed to be going OK. I made one big batch and poured it into two separate initial containers. One was bigger. After 5 days of the initial first batch with yeast, I transferred the liquid into 2 gallon jugs with airlocks. One was a mix from both containers, because I had extra from the bigger one. In theory they should have the same concentration of yeast and sugar, but one of them stopped bubbling. The other is still going, it’s been 2 additional days now.

My question is,
-why did it stop bubbling? (it does seem to have more solids)
-what do I do to fix it?

I am a complete beginner. I’m just trying to piece the process together from bits and pieces of Internet information.
Thanks for all your help everybody.

 

[D the Catastrophist]

What likely happened was a portion of the yeast had clumped and settled, and when you poured into new containers it all went into one, which is the one that is still actively fermenting. When I make wines, I stir twice a day for the first week to ten days, then drop to once a day until it stops bubbling. If you listen, you can hear the fizz when stirring, it's the same sound you get from a carbonated beverage, so I can hear when fermentation slows or stops. I am not worried about oxygenation at this stage as the co2 being off gassed protects it.

I would do two things:
First, pour both back into your fermenter and give it a stir once a day for the next few days. This will allow the yeast to mix and continue to convert the sugars.
Secondly, get a hydrometer as without that trying to tell if your fermentation is done is guesswork.

 

[bernardsmith]

The truth is that bubbling tells you nothing. A wine can stop bubbling because the seal between the bung and the airlock or the bung and the carboy is poor, so the CO2 is escaping not through the liquid but through the tiny gap in the seals. On the other hand bubbles can simply occur if there is a change in ambient temperature or air pressure that reduces the amount of gas (CO2) that the liquid (wine) can hold .. The ONLY reliable /effective way a home wine maker can know whether and how well their wine is progressing is as D the Catastrophist suggests , by measuring all changes in specific gravity (density) with an hydrometer. What you want to see is the steady (could be slow, but steady) drop in specific gravity towards (and then below) 1.000 from whatever the gravity was at the start before you pitched (added) the yeast. IF - if - the gravity is significantly above 1.000 and it is no longer dropping , your fermentation has stalled. There are ways to restart a stalled fermentation, but let's cross that bridge IF IF we have to... Good luck.