Am I on track?

[the_crane]

I did my first rack today and lost about 20 litres of lees. I tried to blend the three 60 litre carboys to mix up the wine a bit as the last one had more sediment than the rest. This was the last one to be filled from my tank.
They are now under air lock and I'll check next week if there is more sediment at the bottom of the carboys.
I tested the pH and it is 4.3 and TA is around 0.625. It tasted pleasant considering how young it is.
My question is when do I start to plan for MLF?

 

[CryptoStorm]

Ph is high - but your TA seems reasonable.

Have you been adding anything?

Ideally your pH should be around 3.2-3.6 for MLF

 

[the_crane]

I have added nothing up to this point.

 

[CryptoStorm]

I forgot that you were using natural yeast.. With natural yeast comes natural bacteria. I suspect your Shiraz has probably been under some sort of ML/bacterial fermentation since day 1.

If you like how it tastes now you could add healthy dose of so2 and a fining agent for a bulk age. Monitor for spoilage.

Or you could add so2 and attempt to adjust the pH.

Peraonally, I'd experiment and go one route with half and one route with the other half..

 

[NorCal]

You could really stand to lower your pH but be very careful with tartaric additions; add to taste, not pH.

Then if taste good, call it a day, big SO2 dose and properly age. If it is sharp and you want to do mlf, hold off on the SO2 until you confirm there is no malo acid.

 

[the_crane]

Aging

I did my final rack on Sunday and surprised to see a small amount of fines at the bottom of each demijohn.
I doses each clean demijohn with campdon tablets, 1 per 5 litres.
I plan to rest the wine for 3 months before bottling.

 

[the_crane]

Residue on top of wine

I checked in on my wine today and noticed this white looking residue on top of the wine.
Would it be from the Campdon tablets? When I added it to each bottle I crushed them and mixed it with water to dissolve it. This mixture went into the demijohn before the wine went in.

 

[the_crane]

So nearly 5 months after pressing I have bottled my Shiraz.
I blended the 3 demijohns as I was getting different ph readings from each butvit finally came out at 4.3. Not ideal for a red but I'm happy with the taste. I purchased a Buon Vino filter to polish it and it certainly brought out a sparkle to the wine. I ended up bottling 200 bottles and the feedback from my friends has been all positive. Looking forward to next year doing it all again

 

[the_crane]

Photos from bottling

Here are some photos of bottling day