Getting Rid of Sulfites

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navyterp

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So after bulk aging my pinot noir for a few months I drew a sample out to get a taste and was overwhelmed by that fantastic smell of sulfur. I ran an accuvine test and it came out right around 110ppm. I knew what probably happened, back when I racked a few weeks ago, I put some sanitizer in a carboy, but forgot to drain it out, and racked right into it. I won't make that mistake again... What are some solutions or tricks I can do to get rid of the high sulfite content, I have heard that multiple rackings can work because it introduces oxygen into the wine, but I would much rather prefer something else. Anyways, I would appreciate any help I can get!

Dave
 
Im not sure this is much that can be done besides splash racking or
just waiting it out ( Bulk aging alot longer). Hopefully someone chimes
in with a better solution.
 
Wade said it. You can either wait for about 2-3 years or more, or you can do a couple of rough rackings. What I'd do is sort of extreme, but some of the local wineries here do it with reds:

Siphon out some of the wine to a primary bucket. Once the carboy has lightened enough for you lift it, lift it up, and pour it out into the primary! Pour it from a 2-3 foot elevation to get a good amount of air in there. Red wines can handle far more oxygen than whites can! If you have another primary, pour from that to the other, then rack back to carboy for it all to settle. Wait 2-3 weeks for the shock to leave the wine from the rough treatment (kinda like bottle shock), and retest your Free SO2. You will probably find it in the 40ppm range.
 
OK, I just wrote a long and detailed answer, and when I hit "Preview" Firefox crashed and it was lost. The short version is to put 2 tsp of drugstore hydrogen peroxide (3%) in the wine and stir well. Wait 24 hours and test the SO2 level. Based on the reduction, guestimate how much more to add to get to 40 ppm. My original estimate was 4.5 tsp.

Edited by: PeterZ
 
Never heard of that 1 Peter, have to store that 1 in my brain although its kind of overfilled with useless knowledge.
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PeterZ is correct. I did this one time on a muscadine and the SO2 drop was very fast. I hesitated to answer this because its one of those additions that should be done very carefully. I would start out with no more than a cap ful and measure from there.
<DIV SuperAdBlocker_DIV_Elements="0" SuperAdBlocker_OnMove_Hooked="0" SuperAdBlocker__Hooked="0" SuperAdBlocker_DIV_FirstLook="0">Bill
 
When I first typed my answer I walked through the calculation (you all know how pedantic I can get) and my results indicated that 4.5 teaspoons (baking teaspoons - not the ones you stir tea with) was the correct amount. The Firefox crashed on me and I lost the post. I suggested starting with 2 tsp, measuring the SO2 before and after, as a guide to how much more to add.

Starting at 110 ppm, with a target of 40 ppm, 2 tsp should get you to about 80 ppm. If so, two more would get you to 50 ppm. Close enough.

navyterp, if you will do carefully controlled tests we can establish a standard rule that 1 tsp of fresh drugstore peroxide (3%) will eliminate X ppm of SO2 as measured by the Accuvin test. That would be good information to have.
 
Knowing you Peter the Dual Core Prcessor crashed with your answer as it was probably 4.1235355733990376 tsps!
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You are the man!
 
No dual core processor, but this is running on a 2.4 GHz Pentium 4 with two 10,000 RPM SCSI drives in a RAID 1 configuration. This machine originally cost about $7000 six years ago. I got it as surplus for $300 two years ago with no operating system. I am running Gentoo Linux with KDE and Firefox.

And it was actually 22.314 grams of solution (theoretically). Precision beyond that point is useless, because we don't have the tools to measure that accurately. Spending $25,000 on a balance that can weigh that accurately makes a serious dent in the wine budget. We have to maintain our priorities!

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Right on! A gentoo man!! Someone who runs an OS compiled directly for their hardware. I wish I could stay in Gentoo more often, but my work dictates that I run a Windows based OS. I was running Gentoo as the main on my laptop a few years back because that was the only Distro I could get running on hardware that new. Man, it was smokin fast back then!
 
Dean,

It still is. I'm thinking about buying a returned from lease Dell GX 280 (stay away from 270's - I've replaced more mobos in those than I can count) with about a gig of ram (~$400) and setting that up as my day-to-day Gentoo box. Then this machine can go back to its other life as a Samba fileserver. I would pull KDE and all of the apps off this machine and set up a cron job to emerge -u world about once a week in the middle of the night. That way, all I would have to do for maintenance would be occaisional kernel compiles and grub.conf updates.
 
masta said:
Chapter 15 of this very analytical and detailed article
describes this process of using hydrogen peroxide to reduce the free
SO2 level in wine.


Accurate measuring and testing is required!



Masta,

I didn't see a link to Chapter 15 could you repost it?

TX
 
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