alternative to chemicals

So with a lot of my country wines i've managed to keep mostly to simple natural ingredients, ie lemon for citric acid, clearing without any stabiliser/finings.

However i'm yet to see any natural alternative to campden or pectolase so any suggestions at all? How would I fare if I left them out?

Not too worried about ageing everything for years I'm quite happy to drink them young, thats the best bit afterall

People have been making wine for hundreds of years without k-meta. Some have got so use to drinking oxidizd wine they don't like anything else and others don't know better.

Can you make good wine without it, absolutely. The longevity, well there isn't any. The risk of making a wine with faults is very high. The risk of vinegar is high. You can make it and have it turn out great, but drink it fast and have zero head space.

Cost vs risk: you spent all of this time, sweat and money trying to make a good wine, is it really worth losing it all for not adding a bit or even a minimal amount of meta. Maybe? There are a lot of people that own houses without buying insurance, have unprotected sex with complete strangers or climb steep roofs without a secured safety harness. Life is full off choices, is it worth the risk? Sometimes it is for the thrill.

You shouldn't fear sulfite--after all, some yeasts produce it in good quantities so is it really a chemical? That being said, I understand you not wanting to over-dose. If you have wines that don't have high PH, then it takes very little sulfite to protect the wine. So the first thing you can do is be sure you always take PH readings of the must before you begin a ferment and adjust as needed. Having the wines at a lower PH will aid in preservation and then you need less sulfite. The next thing I would do is to test your wines for free sulfite. Testing, along with knowing the PH, allows you to use the recommended PPM of free sulfite. If you don't test, and don't know the PH, then you have to guess at sulfite and you will always have to use more.

As you've probably read on many threads, people who don't test and don't know the PH will sulfite to about 50PPM to be sure they cover all the bases. But let's say the PH is 3.4 and you have the ability to test. If you test the carboy of wine and see that you only have 20 PPM, all you have to do is add a small amount of sulfite to get the level up to 32 PPM--which is all you need for a 3.4 PH wine. This is NOT a lot of sulfite!

As Dan said----not only will you have oxidation in these wines over time, but it's a good environment for vinegar production. Once you understand it better, you will not fear using it. If you don't use it, your wines may remain oxidation free for only 6 months or so. It is NOT worth it.

I pretty much agree with what the two fellas up above said. Don't risk your wine and hardwork.

Thanks guys but I think you're all missing the point!!

I was asking if there was a natural/organic alternative (like my example of using a real lemon instead of citric acid).

I'm no new age hippy but it would be nice to go the natural route thats all. Was not saying I wouldn''t use it if I couldn't find something else!

But thanks for replying anyway!

I don't agree with "is it really a chemical?" Everything is a chemical. Some are naturally occurring. Pure chemicals are indistinguishable from their natural sources with the exception that they are more pure.


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newbie2 said:

I was asking if there was a natural/organic alternative (like my example of using a real lemon instead of citric acid).

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Short answer: No.

You could substitute boiling all your must before you innoculate for the camden, but only for its anti microbe action, the antioxidant you would have to substitute with ascorbic acid. You could drop some fungus in there to produce pectinase, dont banana peels or paypaya have some, probably not enough. A natural fining agent would be surgeon fish bladder, but I would feel bad killing a beautiful fish just to have clear wine, better to drink cloudy stuff. Really, unless your lemons grow in your own backyard they are sprayed with a lot of pesticides, is that more natural than using some citric acid? WVMJ

WVMountaineerJack said:

You could substitute boiling all your must before you innoculate for the camden, but only for its anti microbe action, the antioxidant you would have to substitute with ascorbic acid. You could drop some fungus in there to produce pectinase, dont banana peels or paypaya have some, probably not enough. A natural fining agent would be surgeon fish bladder, but I would feel bad killing a beautiful fish just to have clear wine, better to drink cloudy stuff. Really, unless your lemons grow in your own backyard they are sprayed with a lot of pesticides, is that more natural than using some citric acid? WVMJ

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Fair do's, I guess the answer is no then, but I'm sticking with my lemons!