2020 Marquette vintage just went down the drain

[wood1954]

I was looking things over in my little winery and opened a bottle from 2020. Unfortunately the wine smelled very vinegary and was a strange reddish orange color. Ended up dumping about two dozen bottles. So, I must have had too much oxygen exposure and too little so2. My starsan was probably not effective as well as I never checked the ph to see if was still good.
M Y 2021 vintage is still good, nice garnet color, good flavor, but still too much acid and not enough tannin. I’m hoping to correct everything with this year’s vintage. Marquette is a tough grape to work with.

 

[wood1954]

Last nite I kept thinking about this, I thought maybe the poly seal caps I use were not keeping out oxygen so i opened a 2019 which is when I started using the caps and it had good color and was very good no vinegar. So my 2020 vintage reflects poor winemaking on my part.

 

[BRossi]

Boy, sorry to hear about this! So much work to make and then to see it go to waste! I am finishing up primary on two batches of wine this week. I have 5 gal of Marquette that I just put into a glass carboy with some malolactic bacteria. I’m hoping to increase PH for the next two weeks until I leave for AZ. I’m going to treat with SO2 right before I leave. I know MLF takes longer than that, but I‘m hoping to get some benefit from it. I also have 3 gal of Frontenac, same process.

Then today I’m going to rack off what I’m hoping will be another 5 gal of Petite Pearl and maybe 2-3 gal of Marquette picked a few days later than my first batch. This is my first year of getting a significant amount of grapes off my vineyard and it was way more than I expected. I wasn’t really prepared with enough primary fermentors and I had to use 4 5-gal buckets for this last batch. I’m hoping that doesn’t cause a problem. I will also treat with malolactic bacteria after I rack to see if I can get some ph improvement with a final SO2 treatment around 10/27.

This whole year has been one big experiment, but I’m hoping I at least get some drinkable wine! If not, I’ll be throwing away a lot of wine next spring!

 

[wood1954]

I coinoculated my mlb on 9/19 and tested yesterday, the MLF is done. I would imagine your MLF will be half done by 10/27 if you keep the wine warm. I reviewed my notes for 2020, I added too much potassium bicarbonate and then added too much tartaric acid to try to correct and then had to add more potassium bicarbonate. I also added too much so2 and mlf didn’t complete soi really screwed it up. 2021 was better and 2022 is even better. Good luck.

 

[heatherd]

Glad it was just one batch! I had to dump a pinotage batch that was all-grape and wasd thankful it was just one batchas well.