Acidity help

[AJH89]

This will probably be a quickly answered thread. My first batch was strawberry wine wich came out far past expectations. It tasted wonderful. So for the strawberry wine I used almost all strawberries and only like a gallon of water to make this batch and I had to add an acid blend to get the acidity right. So my question for this thread is when dealing with a higher acidity fruit I obviously can only add so much fruit and would have to add much more water to keep the acidity where I want it, but I feel there wouldn't be too much of the fruit flavor... could I not just add as much fruit to keep it flavorful but add something to lower the acidity?

 

[KCCam]

I'm not the expert, but what I've read is that very few things are too acidic. And adding water doesn't reduce acidity, really. If your must is too acidic, you can adjust with a few different things, calcium carbonate (chalk) being one, but I think potassium carbonate or bicarbonate is preferred. It takes longer for the adjustment to take effect than it does for acid, and is easy to overshoot. An alternative is to mix high & low acidity ingredients, rhubarb and strawberry for example. What fruit are you thinking of?

 

[AJH89]

I'm not the expert, but what I've read is that very few things are too acidic. And adding water doesn't reduce acidity, really. If your must is too acidic, you can adjust with a few different things, calcium carbonate (chalk) being one, but I think calcium bicarbonate is preferred. It takes longer for the adjustment to take effect than it does for acid, and is easy to overshoot. An alternative is to mix high & low acidity ingredients, rhubarb and strawberry for example. What fruit are you thinking of?

I wanted to do a dragrons blood, but it only calls for like 30lbs of fruit and the rest water where I'd like to do all fruit

 

[Tim3]

You could add calcium carbonate or acidex to reduce acidity, though it’s only used in extreme situations where your initial PH is lower than 3.0, and only use enough to raise your PH up to 3. Otherwise your wine will end up tasting unbalanced if you “science” the crap out of it. I’d recommend measuring the PH with a meter first.

 

[AJH89]

You could add calcium carbonate or acidex to reduce acidity, though it’s only used in extreme situations where your initial PH is lower than 3.0, and only use enough to raise your PH up to 3. Otherwise your wine will end up tasting unbalanced if you “science” the crap out of it. I’d recommend measuring the PH with a meter first.

I just want my wine to taste like the fruit as much as possible. I don't want water wine with a hint of fruit so to speak

 

[Tim3]

Gotcha. Well I haven’t made that DB recipe but it certainly has quite a fan base. Probably the way to go if you’re fairly new to wine making. If you’re committed to crushing more fruit and adding as little water as possible you’d really need to know your starting PH and starting gravity. From those metrics you can tweak it to your liking by adding water, sugar, acid, or calcium carbonate if required. So if you say you want a 13.5% alcohol wine that has a finished PH of 3.6 then you can create a plan for yourself based on any amount of crushed fruit.

 

[Scooter68]

I would never add water to reduce acidity. Sort of like adding water to paint to lighten the color. You will just end up with a weaker flavored wine.
Blueberries and I beleive cranberries are about the only fruits that might be too heavy on the acid side.

 

[KCCam]

I wanted to do a dragrons blood, but it only calls for like 30lbs of fruit and the rest water where I'd like to do all fruit

For a standard 6 gallon batch, the original recipe calls for 6 lbs of fruit. It is not like any wine you would buy. Based on Lon’s Skeeter Pee (which is no fruit), it adds enough fruit to make a beautiful colour and to enhance the SP recipe with as much or as little complexity as you would like. It is almost fool-proof, and enjoyable the day it is bottled, actually even before that. It is an inexpensive, enjoyable way to learn the ropes, so you don’t waste expensive ingredients while learning. It also gives you stuff to drink so you’re not so tempted to be sampling the wine that should be left to age.

 

[KCCam]

Sort of like adding water to paint to lighten the color.

NICE analogy! That’s a perfect way to visualize it.

 

[Rice_Guy]

You will find that sugar can be used to balance acid, as with adding sugar to cranberry with a TA of 2.0% to “balance” the flavors. , I will run rhubarb at 1.25% TA and back sweeten to 2.015. TA at 2.0% will make it hard to drink a full glass, but the first few sips come with knock your Sox off flavor.
If your goal is a dry wine I would use calcium carbonate, (the local store doesn’t have Acidex) , ground limestone takes a while to dissolve so it has to be done early. One possibility is to pull out some juice / start early and let it react in the fridge and make a final flavor blend later.
Potassium carbonate reacts fast so can be used at bottle time.

There are a few cranberry recipes on the web which give examples of dealing with acid.