Recent content by Jetcontrails

As I mentioned, I’m not a kit winemaker and am not knowledgeable on added kit ingredients. I wasn’t aware that DL-Malic vs L-Malic was added to kits. ML conversion would certainly be different or non-existent with synthetic Malic. As for you disagreeing @Johnd, fair enough. Carry on and share...

I’m not a kit winemaker, but here are my thoughts... -ML bacteria is not dead. -Acti-ML will be fine if added directly to wine. -Skip ML if potassium sorbate has been added. -After ML, your wine may be a bit flabby as most kits are acid adjusted by manufacturer, so be prepared to adjust acid...

Nice work putting in the effort to get the TDS. Keller is a German company. Biolees, now Oenolees, is manufactured by Laffort, a French company. Both products are identical in that they’re designed to replace natural yeast lees. If you have healthy yeast lees, and you wish to age your wine sur...

The product being sold by Morewine as Sur-Lie is what I believe to be Laffort’s Biolees product. Laffort has since rebranded the Biolees to Oenolees. Same stuff. I’ve used Sur Lie/Biolees/Oenolees numerous times on my experimental and commercial wines with great results. It consistently does...

Paddle, 2x4, your arm... they all work for punchdowns. Any oxidation you've experienced in the past was caused by how the wine was handled post fermentation and SO2 maintenance.

Get the fermentation mixed up well once a cap starts forming. During the first half of fermentation, yeast use oxygen as a nutrient for replication and to build cell walls, so aggressive oxygenating punchdowns provide for a healthy and strong yeast population. Once you fall below 10 Brix you...

@VictorV, sounds like a good plan for EM. Variable capacity stainless works great. Skip EM if you had a problematic fermentation or questionable grapes. Just get the wine dry, pressed, and racked off the gross lees. My EM protocol... Maintain temperature 65-75 degrees. Specific gravity less...

Both ways is acceptable, but some food for thought... If you’re fermenting your white below 60°F, long slow fermentation, your malolactic bacteria are virtually inactive. Just too cold. Also, if you inadvertently end up with any RS (residual sugar/stuck AF), better to be void of ML bacteria...