Has anyone used Lysozyme

[sjo]

I have a 8 gallon batch of wine from St.Croix grapes. It was very acidic and I have not been able to bring the acid down enough. I tried a sample backsweetened to 1.01 and it is very good. My problem is it has been through MLF and I am not sure I want to risk the batch going geranium on me. From what I read Lysozyme will prevent mlf from starting or restarting or stop it if it is in progress.
Has anyone used it? Did it work? How much does it take per gallon? There are not a lot of suppliers carrying it and the stuff I found was $30 for 2 ounces.
SJO

 

[seth8530]

I have used it recently, the purpose of lysozyme in this case is to make it ok to add sorbate. MLF is a wonderful thing for most wines and will help smooth out an acidic wine creating creamy notes. You would only need to use lysozyme if you intend to add sorbate. The geranium smell comes from when the mlf bacteria start eating your sorbate.

 

[MiBor]

I have the same red wine in 3 carboys. They went through MLF (CH16) at slightly different paces and one of them was done a couple of weeks ago. About 4 days ago I added lysozyme to it, at the tune of 500ppm (1.9 g/gal) and it dropped a lot of sediment. Last night I looked at it and the sediment was settled on the bottom of the carboy, so I splash-racked the cleared wine under vacuum and was very pleased with its appearance. I checked acidity (0.6%) and pH (3.69 down from 3.74 before lysozyme), but when I tasted it, it was bitter. I tasted the other 2 carboys and they're fine, with just a little bit of bitterness (most likely from the CO2).
Does anyone know if the added bitterness from lysozyme will go away in time? Is there a way to remove lysozyme with a fining agent? The datasheet for the product says that it doesn't affect the taste of wine, but obviously that's not true.
Thanks.

 

[stickman]

I've used Lysozyme many times and never had a bitterness issue. With a red wine, the Lysozyme falls out much like egg white fining, the activity diminishes quickly in tannic reds. I have not noticed any pH changes associated with Lysozyme. I agree that bitterness is usually associated with CO2 in a young wine. Not sure if it matters regarding bitterness, but was the Lysozyme old or out of date? Did you add sulfite to any of the carboys?

 

[MiBor]

Thank you for your quick reply, @stickman. The lysozyme was fresh from MoreWine, purchased a couple of weeks ago. I added 80ppm K-Meta (also new) to to the racked wine in the receiving carboy, to prevent oxidation. There was no added sulfite in the wine prior to this, as it was going through MLF for the past 6 weeks. I'm a little concerned about the bitterness because it's not very noticeable in the carboys that were not treated with lysozyme and I don't remember having this issue when I used it before. It's true that I only used concentrations of up to 200ppm before, to prevent the starting of MLF, and now I used 500ppm to get rid of the ML bacteria in case I needed to back-sweeten the wine a little bit and add some sorbate.

 

[stickman]

I think it's a difficult taste comparison to make at this point, I wouldn't panic, personally I wouldn't even think of tasting a wine that had just been splashed racked and 80ppm of sulfite added. It may take several days to a couple of weeks for the sulfite to bind and the wine flavors to recover.

 

[sour_grapes]

Just to be clear: You dosed to 500 ppm SO2? Or of Lysozome? The sensory threshold is ~100 ppm for SO2.

Edit: upon re-reading, I suspect you meant Lysozome. Carry on!

 

[MiBor]

@sour_grapes I used 500ppm lysozyme on 11/18. That's something like 11.3g/6gal carboy, if I remember correctly. I didn't add SO2 at that time, just the lysozyme. Four days later on 11/22 I racked the wine off the sediment and added about 3g/6gal K-Meta (pH3.7and 5ppm SO2 left over after AF) to the receiving carboy.
@stickman I think you're right. Silly me, I tasted the wine right after splash-racking and the SO2 addition. I'll wait a couple of weeks and taste again. I'm fairly new at wine making an still learning. I really liked the clearing effect of lysozyme though, and I hope the bitterness goes away. I'm prepping 2 new Vadai barrels for this wine and I'd like to keep the ML bacteria out of them, if possible.

 

[mainshipfred]

I believe he was referring to Lysozyme and 500 ppm is the highest recommended dose. I use it only one whites to prevent MLF from starting. I didn't realize it's used as a clearing agent and I never heard about it preventing the geranium taste with the use of sorbate post MLF.

 

[stickman]

Lysozyme isn't marketed as a clearing agent, but it is a protein, so it coagulates with tannin and drops out similar to other protein based fining agents.