How much is too much dilution and acid adjustment for Primitivo?

[Landwaster]

Just received and crushed our Primitivo shipment from CA.

I blended and strained a sample of must and got 28 brix, 3.98 PH, 6.4 TA.

The MoreWine guide has an example of dilution and acidification using similar measurements, and recommends dropping the brix to 24.5 and bringing up the TA by 2 g/L.

I don't want this wine to be too high heavy and high alcohol, but don't want to water it down or make it too tart either. Are these adjustments within an OK range pre-fermentation and MLF? For our 100 gallons of Primitivo must, I would be looking at adding 10 gallons of water with 750g of tartaric acid.

 

[Paulie vino]

Id start with 1/4 to 1/2 of the recommended amount, remeasure, and continue as necessary. Sugar should be easy to get in range. Acid may be a little trickier. My experience with these additions is very limited however.

 

[distancerunner]

It shouldn’t be a big deal. If you’re worried about dilution and the effects on mouthfeel etc, you could siphon off ten percent of the juice and ferment separately as a rose. That will allow for the addition of acidulated water without affecting the end product.

As far as additions go, collect the data and do the calculations. Then add half. Retake the measurements. The difference between what was added and what needs to be added is a fraction of the original calculation.

The problem with corrections is almost always a direct result of under or over estimating the amount of must or the expected gallons/liters of finished wine.

 

[Landwaster]

Thanks for the advice. The must is split into 3 drums so I ended up diluting to 24 Brix on all and then adding additional acid to two. The results after an hour are interesting.:

Original: 3.98 PH, 6.4 TA

Acidulated water only (6 g/l): 3.73 PH, 7.2 TA

Acidulated water plus .5 TA (1.6 g/l) of tartaric: 3.62 PH, 7.8 TA

Acidulated water plus 1.0 TA (3.2 g/l) of tartaric: 3.5 PH, 9.2 TA

Unfortunately I started backwards with the 1.0 TA addition. If I had started with acidulated water only, I probably would have left it at that. These will be blended into the barrel together after pressing so hopefully the acid balances out.

The MoreWine guide doesn't specify what the acidulated water baseline is, so it's interesting that adding it alone increased the dropped the PH and increased TA.

 

[Rice_Guy]

Wine is a buffer of multiple salts and acidic ions. Trial as you have done is the only way to predict the effect of an addition.
With the tools I have I might take 100ml and do a titration curve with 1/10 tartaric acid in distilled. Because of buffering there can be inflections on the pH.