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welcome to WMT from a fellow fruit wine maker

Welcome to WMT from a fellow fruit wine maker. All wines start as a pH balanced fruit juice and in the last few years tannins (natural antioxidants) wind up in many.

Oxidation is the number one reason for loss of fruity aromatics. Using old technology tannins are antioxidants. ,,,, I really like astringent apple tannin and put a few percent crabapple in many non-tannic juices. England has many historical tannic apple varieties. Some folks I know who...

The purpose of TA is to be a reference point for how many H+ ions are in your mouth, ie what your taste buds are reacting to. The conversion to tartaric really doesn’t matter. What matters is that you speak the same language as others. ,,, Consistency of what the flavor impact is. Yes...

Aerobic micro organism. Is the pH above 3.5? What was the metabisulphite treatment or current SO2? ,,, Yes it could be Acetobacter scoby. Yes it could be a mold especially if the pH is high and 6% alcohol. No it is not likely to be protein.

Interesting parts, robust I have found it useful to have at least two pumps running. ex I may be using a vacuum corking head and then want to start a siphon somewhere or run a several hour degassing process. It is useful to have enough valves / T to operate more than one project. A surge...

There are many ways to make wine. As noted above temperature plays a major role in how fast a ferment runs. I have run 85F and finished in three days. Counting from the 28th six days is believable if it was warm. Temperature is a choice, whites tend to do better with lower temps / slower...

Stains; the pigment in red grape will turn dark blue and then decolonized / removed when the pH is above 8.0, I would use powder brewery wash, One Step or similar winery cleaner for the purpose of pulling the color off. Practically speaking many cleaners change the pH of organics so the...

You haven’t lived till you start making pH and TA changes by blending, ,,, and then start making improvements by blending in high tannin ingredient, or high aromatic, or nice color. ,,, So many choices, , , its harvest season.

If you had a microscope you would see suspended yeast. This is enough to generate some gas. Clarifiers aren’t 100% effective, just good enough to make the wine look good. It is possible that the potassium sorbate had absorbed some humidity and list some effectiveness. The other E number is...

The kit I started with: * with a syringe or pipette measure 15 cc (ml) of wine (juice) into beaker * add phenothalene * with a clean syringe pull up 10cc of 0.2 normal sodium hydroxide * add sodium hydroxide drop by drop till the pH rises to 8.2, ,,, color change. Record the volume. * 1.0...

Dry normally equates to we are tasting acid molecules. Acidity is measured as total acidity, in the US as grams of tartaric acid per liter. Less acid per liter will be sensed as sweetener. More acid per liter will be sensed as more acidic, or more dry. A technique that removes acid like MLF...

Pearson’s square is not exact, but it is close enough that I use it for guessing how TA will blend. calcium carbonate is slow reacting. I wouldn’t be surprised if your pH is higher in a week. Check it, if the drift is over 0.2 unit check again in another week. I degas all sparkling wines and...

This is where we have several opinions on how to deal with it. * my style is to run low pH. Yeast slow down at 2.8 so my normal is pH about 3.2+/-. I have lots of fruit therefore I run 100% fruit therefore see high TA as 1.2% therefore the finished gets backsweetened to 1.012 +/-. *pH above...

The process of raising the pH is changing where the salts in the system buffer out. The process depends on which minerals / acids are present so we only know what the end is by trying it as titrating one against the other. As a very rough guess, if I took a 1:1 banana water with a TA of 0.19%...

A natural yeast nutrient is bird poop. If wanting to clean up what the chickens have pooped I would solubilize it ex 1 to 1 and then filter. The filtrate could be dried down to make a powder. I like the farm fertilizer idea. But i don’t know what to expect as contamination. Low tech...

Chemical nitrogen is urea and / or diamonium phosphate, it may get wet and ammonia is generated. And, Yeast will utilize ammonia as a preferred nitrogen source since they don’t have to work to utilize it. In the scheme of things the salt is only an ammonia complex so any white solid left was...

My guess is that it is related to Campden which should be 100% potassium or sodium metabisulphite. The effect is probably related to a change in electrical charge which is causing particles to clump. As Bryan notes your wine is young. If we looked at it under a microscope we would find lots of...

One of the club members does sparkling and suggests a glocol bath in the freezer instead of salt brine , , , when you get to that stage.

When I juice frozen rhubarb I get a TA of 1.35 to 1.69%. Since a wine typically is from 0.5 (dry wine) to 0.7% (table sweet) TA we could expect to be in the balance range with 1 to 2 or 1 to 3 dilution. Two pounds should get you in the pH target but your finished wine may need extra acid. A...