Additives added too soon

[Steven Glass]

I am doing a wine expert kit and messed up. I added the sorbate, kieselsol, and chitosan without racking. The wine has cleared, and I plan on racking it two more times and filtering it. Should I rack it and re add the additives? filtering it.

 

[winemaker81]

Nope. The wine is fine. A likely reason for racking before adding K&C is that the fining agent has less to do with the gross lees gone. But yours has cleared so it's not a problem.

Never add more than the recommended amount of sorbate, as it can produce off flavors.

A suggestion - don't plan the number of rackings. Let the wine tell you when it needs racking, and do as few as possible. At this point you need to rack off the sediment, and probably don't need to rack again before bottling.

Fine lees (yeast hulls) doesn't hurt the wine, so if you have some sediment, it doesn't matter.

 

[Steven Glass]

Great! Thanks for the advice.

 

[Tripled92]

Nope. The wine is fine. A likely reason for racking before adding K&C is that the fining agent has less to do with the gross lees gone. But yours has cleared so it's not a problem.

Never add more than the recommended amount of sorbate, as it can produce off flavors.

A suggestion - don't plan the number of rackings. Let the wine tell you when it needs racking, and do as few as possible. At this point you need to rack off the sediment, and probably don't need to rack again before bottling.

Fine lees (yeast hulls) doesn't hurt the wine, so if you have some sediment, it doesn't matter.

Agreed, when we first started out we were always wondering how often we should rack but now we pretty much just let the wine tell us. To give you a number it’s pretty much just once. Once it goes in carboy for first time let it sit for required time. The rack off its lees. Let it sit some more, my dad built this system to rack so it’s basically perfect but if their ever is any sediment left we rack again and then bottle