Sulfur smell

We made red wine from our grapes 3 weeks ago. Primary fermentation went perfect and the wine went to the new stainless steal tanks that we just purchased. For some reason , I smelled a strong aroma of sulfur ( rotten egg) in our wine today coming from the bottom of the tanks. When I opened the lids the taste and smell of the same wine was very fresh and good. Is my wine in danger? What shoul I do?

Tatiana said:

We made red wine from our grapes 3 weeks ago. Primary fermentation went perfect and the wine went to the new stainless steal tanks that we just purchased. For some reason , I smelled a strong aroma of sulfur ( rotten egg) in our wine today coming from the bottom of the tanks. When I opened the lids the taste and smell of the same wine was very fresh and good. Is my wine in danger? What shoul I do?

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At some point your yeast was stressed and generated hydrogen sulfide. That's the source of the smell. Try rack splashing to allow the H2S to vaporize.

normally the wine is racked three days after movement into secondary. this removes the wine from the gross lees. these lees can impart a rotten egg smell to the wine. after racking adding K-Meta then rack again in three weeks. finally age for at least three months before racking again.

Thank you for your replay.

I will be racking my 150 gal today. I did not rack right away last year . I did it three month later after the press . And it had no problem with any bad aroma.
The difference was that we used carboys for storage last year. I also had to cool my must this year ( it went up to 91 once) . It could of stressed the yeast.
Hopefully, we can safe my red !
Thanks again!

Tatiana,
if the sulfur smell continues after splash racking, you can try Ridulees or Nobleese, I used Ridulees to eliminate the sulfur smell in one wine recently, it worked great.

I agree with the reduless. Don't let this wine persist with H2S on it--always best to deal with it right away or you'll begin to taste it. You always smell H2S before you can taste it and you have to deal with the issue immediately.

I went through this last year. I tried splash racking then the copper wire thing. I ended up using Reduless and it did the trick. I now keep it on hand. I have used it one more time since.

RR

150 gallons of wine is sizable investment, with the ss tanks and all.
just curious as to why you did not know what was going on with your wine.
most people that encounter h2s are beginners with small batches, not 150 gallons...

jamesngalveston said:

150 gallons of wine is sizable investment, with the ss tanks and all.
just curious as to why you did not know what was going on with your wine.
most people that encounter h2s are beginners with small batches, not 150 gallons...

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Good question! This is the first year that we have had this quantity of grapes, as a new vineyard we planted 3 yrs. ago just started producing. The previous 2 years were our first experience with wine making, and we had only about 25 gallons each year. We used carboys and learned the process from a couple books from amazon. We never encountered any H2S problems.

As it turns out, our current situation is not as bad as we thought (we hope!) - we smelled the H2S only when we sampled the wine from the valve at the bottom of the tank. We think the H2S had concentrated there in the Lee's. When we splash racked we we never smelled any H2S until we got down to the very bottom of the tank and even then we barely smelled any. Apparently it vaporized pretty easily. We are keep a close eye (nose!) on it.

Thanks everyone for all all your great advice!