Hello! I am new to making wine from grapes. I have made wine from juice from vineyards prior. I was able to pick enough Mourvedre grapes this past weekend to make a 5 gal must. I miss understood an on line post saying to add 1tsp of sulfates per 5 gal wine must. I added 5 tsp of pottasium meta bi sulfate to a 5 gal wine must. I have read about splashing to remove the extra sulfates...but i am wondering if this overdosing is too much to remove from the wine must. Any thoughts on how to rescue?
Added too much Potassium Meta Bi sulfate in Must
- Thread starter BooCho
- Start date
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Check out this thread: Removing excess sulfite.
I just measured a tsp of K-meta and it turned out to be 6.5 grams. 5 times that would give you 32.5 grams making the resulting free SO2 1000 ppm or 20.00 molecular. That's a lot of sulfite and I'm not sure splash racking can get it low enough. Hopefully someone else can chime in.
Thank you MainshipFred. I appreciate you weighing in. I was just at our local Home Brew store talking with a wine maker. basically said what everyone else is saying. Just splash rack a lot and see if you can get a fermentation going. Thank you for your input.
Hydrogen peroxide will also remove the SO2, you'll need to do a little research into the strength of the particular Hydrogen Peroxide that you have to determine the proper dose. HP will knock the SO2 out immediately.
Found this calculator. There's an issue with using too much H2O2 but I can't remember what it is. I want to say it could bleach the wine but not sure. I know sulfites will bleach it.
https://www.winebusiness.com/tools/?go=winemaking.calc&cid=22
https://www.winebusiness.com/tools/?go=winemaking.calc&cid=22
Thank you for sending the calculator Fred! I will use moving forward. Not sure i can save this must. I have been splash racking every couple of hours a few times to release as much as possible. I dont know if it will be enough. Your input has been very helpful. Thank you again.
@BooCho, do you have a way to measure your SO2? I'm not sure I would want to do this blindly. You've already released some SO2 by splashing, but no way to know how much. And as others have mentioned, I don't know the effect of too much h2o2, other than knowing a teaspoon of it causes a vomit reflex in a small dog (you can imagine how I know that). And obviously, until it is neutralized, there is no way to get the SO2 you need to prevent oxidation.
