Merlot Impatience

Since taking the hydrometer reading 3 days ago, I have been keeping an eye on the airlock on the Merlot to make sure it got going again. In 3 days I hadn't seen a single bubble. I put the first day down to it needing to fill up the remaining space with co2 before it started coming through the airlock, but after 3 days I was worried it had stalled.

I decided my best bet would be to try to get a bit more of the yeast suspended back into the wine, so I removed the airlock, placed a clean thumb over the hole and very slowly and carefully turned the container upside down so as to get some of the yeast off the bottom, while trying not to let the wine splash or bubble.

Having done this, I decided to take a hydrometer reading just to confirm nothing had changed. (Yes, I know I should have done this first.) I was surprised to find the reading was 0.998, though now I'm not sure if this is because of the extra yeast suspended in the wine, or if it really has been fermenting, despite the lack of bubbles. I will try to do some research to see if yeast would decrease the gravity and post an edit back here.

Day	Time per bubble (secs)	Gravity
0	infinite	1.078
3	2
5	9
9	15
12	18
15	30
21	55	1.000
24	infinite (after hydrometer reading)	0.998

I think this is the first time since I started brewing that I have let impatience affect my brewing. Hopefully I haven't done any damage, but I will be sure to leave it a while now before taking another reading.