# How do I reduce acid in red win with Baking Soda?



## Alet

Please can anyone help me out? I'm a beginner. How do I reduce the acid by using baking powder? I would appreciate your help - thank you!


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## Julie

What are you making and what is your recipe with sg and acid level.

And welcome to WineMakingTalk


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## Rocky

Hello, Alet, and welcome to the forum. 

Regarding your question, I am not familiar with using baking powder to reduce the acid in a wine. Baking powder is normally composed of Sodium Bicarbonate, Cream of Tartar and Cornstarch. I am not sure I would want to add the latter two to my wines. A reference I have (The Winemaker's Answer Book by Alison Crowe of _Wine Maker_ magazine) suggests using Potassium Bicarbonate to accomplish this at the rate of 1 gram per liter of wine to reduce the TA by about 1 gram per liter. The directions are as follows: "Dissolve the powder directly into your wine and let settle for six to eight weeks as potassium and tartrate solids will precipitate out (solids settle best once fermentation is complete). Once you've achieved good settling, you can rack the de-acidified wine off the solids."

If you can get this compound, I suggest you try it with a small quantity of the wine to start. If you are pleased with the results, you can de-acidify the rest of your wine. _Buona fortuna!_


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## winointraining

If you use it use baking soda not baking powder. i've used it and have had no problems yet but i'm just starting to learn about TA , and I may have just gotten lucky. if you use it I don't know the formula for it, if you use it be careful it will fizz as it reacts with the acid.


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## winointraining

Just checked , mine is sodium bicarbinate nothing else added.


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## manvsvine

you might consider yeast selection ( 71b and maurvin b both reduce acid during ferment) , maloactic fermentation (reduces acidity) and lastly cold stabilisation to get acid down in a red wine.

you could also blend in a lower acid red , look like you are in Portugal , grapes grown in hotter portions of the country will have lower acid levels so produce lower acid wine. 

baking soda is not something I would ever use on a wine. there are other carbonate based products you can use but these are pretty drastic and usually have a negative impact on the overall quality of grape wine.


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## Alet

*Thank you!*

Hallo Rocky,
Thank you so much for your valued reply! I'm helping my brother-in-law with is winemaking and I really am learning from scratch. We will try the Potassium Bicarbonate. This wine was made September 2012, the acidity then was .42 At this stage the acidity is 1.24. We have the wine in a stainless steel container with a lid that shuts tightly so no oxidation can take place. However, as we bag-in-box, and the level of the wine goes down, we also obviously lower the lid. But somehow oxidation still occurs. My brother-in-law remembers that he was advised last year to use Potassium Bicarbonate as well. Now that I'm on board, I will make notes and see how much I can learn. Thank you once again.




Rocky said:


> Hello, Alet, and welcome to the forum.
> 
> Regarding your question, I am not familiar with using baking powder to reduce the acid in a wine. Baking powder is normally composed of Sodium Bicarbonate, Cream of Tartar and Cornstarch. I am not sure I would want to add the latter two to my wines. A reference I have (The Winemaker's Answer Book by Alison Crowe of _Wine Maker_ magazine) suggests using Potassium Bicarbonate to accomplish this at the rate of 1 gram per liter of wine to reduce the TA by about 1 gram per liter. The directions are as follows: "Dissolve the powder directly into your wine and let settle for six to eight weeks as potassium and tartrate solids will precipitate out (solids settle best once fermentation is complete). Once you've achieved good settling, you can rack the de-acidified wine off the solids."
> 
> If you can get this compound, I suggest you try it with a small quantity of the wine to start. If you are pleased with the results, you can de-acidify the rest of your wine. _Buona fortuna!_


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## manvsvine

http://morewinemaking.com/content/manuals

Starting from scratch , more wines free winemaking manuals are great to learn from


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## Downwards

The difference between baking soda and baking powder has been described here, but the reason is because baking soda only reacts in something that is already acidic, where as baking powder comes with it's own dry acid for a dough or batter that requires leavening from gas, but doesn't have any acid already. So baking powder reacts with itself, and would not change pH of your wine at all. You'd just be adding sodium to your wine if you used it. I'm not suggesting that baking soda is good to add either, but at least whatever it caused in flavor (could be bad) it would have some of the desired effect with acidity.


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