Recent content by Martin Siebring

That looks similar to the place I have purchased barrels through before, https://midwestbarrelco.com/ Small-format whiskey barrels are easy to come by, but I can't find small-format wine-barrels anywhere.

I meant used enough to not give any oak flavor. I hadn't considered untoasted, I guess that could be an option.

Our wine club makes a red blend every year. I would like to age a little of each of the 3 varietals separately, but I can't find a source for any small neutral barrels. Any ideas?

Yeah that makes sense. I'm not sure why I was thinking the reading needed to stablize, it doesn't say that anywhere in the manual...

I'm following the directions precisely. No matter how much SO2 titrant I add, the reading on the meter will spike up to a high number and then gradually decrease back down to a reading around 5. The manual says the endpoint is reached when the reading stays above 50, but it never gets there...

What are you using to measure so2? I just got the Vinmetrica SC-300 but it's giving strange readings. I'm wondering if I have a bad probe.

Right, I have a tester and will test it, I was just looking for a starting point. Do people test weekly, monthly, quarterly, etc.? And can anybody shed more light on why you only top monthly or so? Thinking purely about the surface area of the wine, it seems like topping more frequently would...

Speaking of sulphite, any rough ideas on how much I should expect to add and how often? I hit it with 50 ppm just after filling the barrels about a month ago. The plan right now is to bottle in January 2020. This is my first rodeo with aging in barrels.

So now I have a related question. How frequently should I top-off the barrels? I'm losing a lot more to evaporation than I would have ever imagined. It is taking about 1 quart per week to keep both barrels full. Should I be doing this more frequently to keep the headspace at the absolute...

Hi, I have two 59-gallon neutral oak barrels filled with a blend of Cab, Merlot and Petite. My wife made some long cheesecloth "teabags" with glass marbles in the bottom and oak spheres. I have 2 of these teabags in each barrel. My question is this: Should I be gently stirring the wine...

Thank you all for your responses and input so far. The question I came up with this morning is this: Should I hit all the wine with some base level of SO2 to give it some protection and rack it while I figure out what to do about the acid problem? It has only been 3 weeks since I started the MLF.

Not a silly question at all. I calibrate the meter every time before I run a set of tests. I don't have another meter to check it against, and I don't know anybody else around that has one. So I'm kind of stuck on that.

I have it stored in HDPE, my plan was to make some teabags with oak cubes as the next step. When you say bottle early, how early? In past years we have barrel aged for close to a year before bottling.

I just ran tests on degassed samples. The pH didn't register any change, still at 4.2 for both samples. But the TA of the untreated wine measured 5.2, and the TA of my bench trial with the acid addition measured 5.8. Those seem like more realistic numbers based on the pH and my acid addition...

The pH values at crush were 3.6, 3.7 & 3.9 for the 3 varieties. I didn't measure them at press, good learning for next year. I just did taste tests then and I thought everything was great. I did a bench test last night, I pulled off a gallon and added 1.9g of tartaric acid dissolved in a...