Baking soda seemed like the solution

[botigol]

I was so excited when I came across the discussion about using baking soda to reduce acidity, because I had created a situation and now I am hoping that you can help me with the resulting situation.

This pertains to a pair of kits that I made; a Winexpert Coastal Red and a Winexpert Coastal White. Both were good as they were, but better with just a touch of simple syrup. Easy enough, until you factor in some impatience and attempting to make this change while sick, more specifically not able to taste normally. So, I added too much syrup. Dumb action, but I did it. So in order to correct this I performed some bench trials (after I was better) adding an acid blend solution.

After letting the wines rest for a couple of weeks I found that the acid balanced out the sweetness very nicely, but there was a tart aftertaste. I then put both wines into my extra refrigerator in order to cold stabilize, thinking that a reduction in tartaric acid could only help, but no crystals came out after six weeks. At that point I resigned myself to how they were since adding more simple syrup would have just taken me back to my original problem, so I bottled.

This is when I came across the thread about using baking soda to reduce acidity. I tried it in one bottle and it seemed like a good solution. I noticed that not all of the baking soda dissolved, but figured that a little time and agitation would solve that issue. So I pulled the corks, added approximately 1/24 teaspoon of baking soda per bottle and re-corked. Now after almost a month there are still undissolved particles floating in my wines which wouldn't be that bad, but some glasses have a bit of an off-flavor, almost like a cleaner, so obviously I am leaning towards the baking soda being the culprit.

Any ideas on how to proceed?

 

[Dylan]

All I can say is... less is more. Patience is a virtue.

 

[dessertmaker]

Drink it quick, give it away, use it for cooking, and find other ways to get rid of it. Surely you have a friend or two who will drink it just because its got alcohol. Start over. Don't add anything early on. Don't add acid without a kit to check levels. Don't add simple syrup without doing bench tests.

If you want to experiment, bottle most of your wine first and set aside a couple of gallons in appropriate sized carboys or glass jugs so you don't risk your entire batch.

 

[jswordy]

I'm just going to say that it is not the baking soda that is causing the off flavor. The wine has become unbalanced by a cascade of error, and it is also probably bottle shocked from being corked, uncorked, and corked again - to say nothing of any shaking/stirring that may have gone on.

I use baking soda in wine, after being taught to do that by an old-timer lady vintner. It is neutral sodium bicarbonate, a poor man's version of the potassium bicarbonate in common wine industry use. It does add some sodium to the wine. I have never used it in a kit. IIRC, the thread you mention discussed using it with scratch made recipes. I have never used it in the bottle like you did, so I never have had to worry about particles not dissolving. AFAIK, it always has dissolved. It is possible there is something in your factory-made must that precipitated with the added baking soda.

I am loving Dylan's very simple post, which says it all. The errors here are multiple, and of course the natural tendency is then to blame something external.

At the risk of sounding harsh, which I do not intend, in the future:

1.) Do not taste test wine when you cannot taste. In fact, do not work in your wine when you are sick. It causes errors and possibly contamination. With the exception of primary fermentation, wine can wait until you are well.

2.) Do not attempt to fix an oversweetened wine by adding tartness. You are compounding your troubles, not fixing them. You fix an overly sweet wine by blending it with a like dry wine.

3.) Do not fix acidity that you yourself have added to the wine by adding baking soda. Baking soda is a buffer used to reduce acidity produced by the fruit, not to cover up past sins of the vintner. Also, you are adding all this to a kit juice mix, where you have no idea what is in the original mix from the factory, which leads to...

4.) Do not alter your kits until you are a well-experienced vintner. Not one iota! Make them by the instructions until you are well-versed. Well-versed vintners have successfully made numerous musts of their own from scratch and have grown confident of their ability to manipulate flavors.

5.) Do not rush in your winemaking. A slower, more deliberate and more deliberative process could have prevented this compounding of errors. More think, less do.

We all have made errors like this, myself included. The great thing is that one never forgets when he or she errs in this fashion, provided he or she will look squarely at the errors in an effort to improve and not try to blame something else. I guarantee you will never do any of that again!

All that said, take those bottles of wine and put them someplace cool and dark and out of mind. Forget them! On May 20, 2014, or thereafter, open one.

UNDER EDIT: I have thought of one more thing. Be sure you use baking SODA and not baking powder. Baking powder has added acid and starch. The starch will not dissolve in your wine.

 

[Sammyk]

I generally add the baking soda to poured glasses of wine if it tastes acidic and then stir well.

 

[botigol]

To clarify some misconceptions and statements in this thread; they may not be material, but in some combination may help:
1. I pitched the yeast on these kits last August, so they are not young and I didn't make changes until after they were well into their development, based them being relatively inexpensive, low TDS kits.
2. I'm not trying to blame the baking soda for causing any issue. However, I did mean to say that I think that the current taste that I do not want is due to the baking soda not fully dissolving. Both wines were near-crystal clear after the acid additions and neither demonstrated an off flavor at that time, only the tartness on the finish. Seems reasonable to me that the last thing added is the cause of both the cloudiness and the flavor, especially since it is more pronounced in the last couple of glasses of the bottle.
3. I just got through a very frustrating period in which I wasn't healthy for more than three to five days at a stretch; this started in October and lasted until about a week and a half ago. When I backsweetened I thought that I was on the road to recovery, since I was able to taste food again, but unfortunately was mistaken. I even had help for my bench trials, but since I fell back sick within a couple of days and I later found that the wines were too sweet, these facts led me to realize that I wasn't tasting well at that time. So as ill-advised as my original actions were in retrospect, they certainly made sense at the time.
4. Jim, while I respect your experience, others use sodium/potassium carbonate/bicarbonate to reduce acidity without regard to the source of the juice. I even found an article in WineMaker discussing it.
5. I am pretty sure that I identified myself or at least my actions as the root of this issue and that since they didn't work as I had hoped that I need help.

That said, my options seem few and far between at this stage. They seem to be drinking as-is/dumping it on unsuspecting others, filtering and waiting. I do not currently have filtering equipment and wasn't planning on such an investment, so at least for the moment this option isn't viable. As for waiting it out, I have read from different sources that these wines tend to reach their peak somewhere between six and eighteen months. Do you give any credence to this timeframe? If so, is it sangria time since they are already nine months in and may need significant time in order to overcome the changes that I made? Any other ideas?

 

[gird123]

I would try a bottle every month. If it reaches a stage were you like it. Drink it. Otherwise wait. With The extra acidity it could take much longer to mature.

 

[gird123]

If you get a bad bottle dump it and move on

 

[jswordy]

To clarify some misconceptions and statements in this thread; they may not be material, but in some combination may help:
1. I pitched the yeast on these kits last August, so they are not young and I didn't make changes until after they were well into their development, based them being relatively inexpensive, low TDS kits.
2. I'm not trying to blame the baking soda for causing any issue. However, I did mean to say that I think that the current taste that I do not want is due to the baking soda not fully dissolving. Both wines were near-crystal clear after the acid additions and neither demonstrated an off flavor at that time, only the tartness on the finish. Seems reasonable to me that the last thing added is the cause of both the cloudiness and the flavor, especially since it is more pronounced in the last couple of glasses of the bottle.
3. I just got through a very frustrating period in which I wasn't healthy for more than three to five days at a stretch; this started in October and lasted until about a week and a half ago. When I backsweetened I thought that I was on the road to recovery, since I was able to taste food again, but unfortunately was mistaken. I even had help for my bench trials, but since I fell back sick within a couple of days and I later found that the wines were too sweet, these facts led me to realize that I wasn't tasting well at that time. So as ill-advised as my original actions were in retrospect, they certainly made sense at the time.
4. Jim, while I respect your experience, others use sodium/potassium carbonate/bicarbonate to reduce acidity without regard to the source of the juice. I even found an article in WineMaker discussing it.
5. I am pretty sure that I identified myself or at least my actions as the root of this issue and that since they didn't work as I had hoped that I need help.

That said, my options seem few and far between at this stage. They seem to be drinking as-is/dumping it on unsuspecting others, filtering and waiting. I do not currently have filtering equipment and wasn't planning on such an investment, so at least for the moment this option isn't viable. As for waiting it out, I have read from different sources that these wines tend to reach their peak somewhere between six and eighteen months. Do you give any credence to this timeframe? If so, is it sangria time since they are already nine months in and may need significant time in order to overcome the changes that I made? Any other ideas?

I apologize. I figured I would come off harsh in that when I wrote it, could not seem to write it without coming off that way, and almost deleted it. Should have. I just figured when you wrote near the end "so obviously I am leaning towards the baking soda being the culprit," that meant you were trying to blame the baking soda.

A lot of techniques I have learned I had to learn offline because people don't post it for fear it won't work for someone else or else fear they will be criticized for not doing it in an accepted way. It'a all about what works for you. If reading Winemaker works for you, great. But please let me try again about the juice.

When I make wine, I am trying to manipulate the natural acidity on either side of the pH line it has set. On the other hand, what you were trying to do with the acid was to offset a high sugar problem with acidic bitterness, a different problem somewhat akin to making a balanced lemonade. In wine, the only solution to that problem with an excellent degree of success is to blend the too-sweet wine with a like dry wine.

If you want to try your hand at an acid sugar offset again, I highly recommend you DO make lemonade and use a bottle of RealLemon as your acid source. It requires further clearing later, but it is far more forgiving than acid or acid blend. I suggest the lemon juice because it is not a highly concentrated acid and everything I have read and done says once you go too far on acid, it is exceedingly hard to claw your way back.

Like I said, I have been here myself. I have gone too far with acid trying to add tooth to a too sugared wine (which to me tastes featureless). The thing with adding acid to taste is that to my palette, I had to learn through failures that when it gets to the place where I say that just a little more would be perfect, that is when NOT to add any more. Even one grain more added after that, it seems, ruins the thing. In the cases I speak of, by then I had zigged way over one way and zagged way over the other, and adding calcium or baking soda wasn't going to correct this wreck on the highway. Lo and behold, it didn't. It's like driving a car and overcorrecting. Hard to get it back on the road straight.

It takes 12-18 months for those mistakes to age enough to knock down the acid. By golly, one wine was tart up to month 19, when it finally gave up and mellowed all at once.

Never had trouble with baking soda dissolving ever before, which is why I wondered about whether you had used baking powder instead.

FWIW, which may not be much:

a.) High acidity naturally diminishes with time, so you can age it. Stash the bottles and move on. When you forget you even have them, that's when it will be getting about right for a taste.

b.) You can blend this wine, perhaps also filtering somewhat it by pouring through 2 layers of cheesecloth, and then allowing it to clear. A dry, low tannin complementary wine is what I'd try.

c.) You could just toss it, but then you toss the experience of what it could become after aging. I've only tossed one mistake batch, and that was because it was dead. I have kept and aged every "not quite right" batch I have ever done. Boy have some of them come around. And even the ones that never did, I learned something in that process.

 

[botigol]

No worries Jim. I shortened my original post in order to try to try to keep it under ten thousand words and may not have gotten sufficient explanation in order for others to interpret correctly (obviously there was a bit of back-story there).

Nope, definitely baking soda. I even tested it in water in order to make sure that I didn't have an off batch and it dissolved perfectly, so it must have bonded with something in the wine; maybe something from the kit itself or maybe one of the acids from the blend that I used. Since the particles seemed to have been settling I put some bottles upright in order to see how that goes.

I like the lemonade idea and have made note of it for future batches. Hopefully I don't end up in that situation again, but at least I have another option if/when it comes around.

Luckily it's not so bad that I would dump it. Unfortunately I have had to dump two batches in my short tenure: I had a passion fruit batch that was really tasty, but the glass jug broke and I wasn't willing to take a chance with the broken glass and a batch of apfelwein that had a nasty brett infection. So these will stick around...actually I am wondering if maybe others would not notice the off flavor that I found, so I might ask a couple of friends to at least taste them and see what they say. Also, the cheesecloth idea may play out well. Any thoughts to using a coffee filter since it would be a little less porous?

Thanks!

 

[jswordy]

I have tried paper coffee filters without much success. They clog too easily. Maybe your experience will be better. There are these plastic reusable coffee filters on the market with a very fine mesh, and I always wanted to try one of those. 2 or 3 layers of cheesecloth seems to be as fine as I can get it.

I think the wine will be a surprise if it sits a year. What is there to lose?

Everyone who has some experience in making wine has dumped batches. People don't talk about mistakes often, and it's kind of too bad because that's where the real learning is if the student is willing. I once completely killed a batch and it took me maybe a month of forensics after I had dumped it to figure out what on earth I had done wrong. Even with good notes, I did not find my error for some time. I'll not make that mistake again, though! Part of the journey.