pH 2.8 - suitable for sparkling wine or adjustment needed

[blumentopferde]

Hello there!

I have a batch of rosé must with a ph level as low as 2.8 and acidity of 11.5 gramms per liter.
That's definitely too much acidity for a wine, so now i wonderhow to proceed...

As sparkling wines are usually quite high in acidity I wonder if that would still be suitable for a sparkling wine - and if not - if anyone has recommendations to which level I should reduce the acidity!

I also wonder what would be the best way to reduce acidity. Any ideas or suggestions?

Kind regards,
blumentopferde

 

[AaronSC]

What grape is the rosé made from? I made a great totally dry sparkling wine using the champagne method from Catawba juice at 12 g/l and it was a crowd pleaser. I took may years of aging, though.

I dealt a lot with wine with over 10 g/l TA in the Finger Lakes -you can still make good wine!

Have you considered blending this with another, lower acid wine?

Another option is to sweeten the wine some. With high acid, sweetness can make the wine much more palatable, and the sweet taste is often not really that noticeable with the tartness of the wine.

 

[blumentopferde]

Thanks for your reply!

It's a mix of different grape varieties, a large part of it is "Blauer Wildbacher" a local Austrian variety that is very high in acidity and thus mostly used for rosé.

Blending is not an option. My white has 8.5 g/l of TA which I would consider as just within the acceptable level (I usually want to stay between 6 and 8 grams). Blending these two together would result in even more overly acidic wine - besides the color loss.

Good to know that I could still level this out with sugar. Maybe that's just what I'll do... I was also considering malolactic fermentation, but I'm hesitating, as it might reduce the fruitiness of the wine... Do you have any experience with it?

And how much sugar did you add to your sparkling Catawba wine? And what was the idea behind the long aging process?

Kind regards,
blumentopferde

 

[NCWC]

Calcium Carbonate will reduce T/A pre fermentation more than pH
bench trial it

 

[blumentopferde]

Fermentation should be over by now. Can I use calcium carbonate after the fermentation as well? And does it influence the taste besides lowering acidity?

 

[Rice_Guy]

* the first suggestion is to degas the wine. Yeast don’t like pH 2.8 and probably would stall out at that level, ,,,, I will guess the starting juice was in the 3’s,,, and after degassing it will be 0.1 unit above where it started. CO2 will lower the pH as well as increase the TA.
* 11.5 grams is high for a dry wine but it isn’t high for a sweetened wine
* from a chemical point of view CaCO3 will reduce acid. What the store has is powdered limestone which will tend to settle out and be slow reacting so it’s better on juice. The flavor of calcium is “normal” where as if you use potassium it carries a bitter. The general process is tweak post ferment with potassium since it is fast, ,,, but not too much.
* chill it in the garage to crystallize tartrates
* a malic acid fermentation will drop the TA

 

[NCWC]

Fermentation should be over by now. Can I use calcium carbonate after the fermentation as well? And does it influence the taste besides lowering acidity?

Potassium Carbonate is used post-fermentation. PC will reduce pH more than TA opposite of Calcium Carb

 

[AaronSC]

Thanks for your reply!

It's a mix of different grape varieties, a large part of it is "Blauer Wildbacher" a local Austrian variety that is very high in acidity and thus mostly used for rosé.

Blending is not an option. My white has 8.5 g/l of TA which I would consider as just within the acceptable level (I usually want to stay between 6 and 8 grams). Blending these two together would result in even more overly acidic wine - besides the color loss.

Good to know that I could still level this out with sugar. Maybe that's just what I'll do... I was also considering malolactic fermentation, but I'm hesitating, as it might reduce the fruitiness of the wine... Do you have any experience with it?

And how much sugar did you add to your sparkling Catawba wine? And what was the idea behind the long aging process?

Kind regards,
blumentopferde

Blauer Wildbacher: does this mean Blue Wild Badger like I think it does?

I never did ML on any whites or rosés, because the fruitiness was important to me. Cool climate grapes have great varietal character and fruit, but most are not going to become the rich, soft California style wine (which I personally don't care for anyway) no matter what you do to it. I have found that ML can have a profound impact on the test and smell of the wine. This year I put one 9 gallon container of barber through ML and left the other without. Huge difference -the ML wine has lost so much of the fresh fruit character and (at this stage at least) tastes like a boring soft California supermarket wine (hopefully this will change). The "no ML" batch is vibrant and full of Barbera character.

For high acid whites I never added chemicals to reduce the acid, I just didn't like the idea, though I don't think there's anything wrong with it. I would definitely cold stabilize to remove acid that way, sometimes for weeks at around 35ºF (this was a natural feature of my old stone cellar).

For back-sweetening still whites I would start at around 2% and then taste to see if it had reached a good balance. Often jyou could get a big reduction in perceived acidity with minimal perceptible sweetness.

The Catawba sparkling wine had the cold treatment, but no sweetening because it needed to do a secondary fermentation in the bottle. Catawba is a grape that does well when made into a sparkling wine and also ages very well do to its body, acid and fruit character that doesn't fade easily. It's a great grape, but I highly doubt you will find this in Europe!

In terms of aging it was just that -letting the wine age on the bottle lees for years. Unlike real Champagne method I left the lees in the bottle and was just just careful about pouring it. It improved for ten years, and some of it may still be improving somewhere (I made a ton of wine so I gave a lot away). A friend showed up at my house the other day with a port style wine I made in 1997 -still drinking well!

 

[blumentopferde]

* the first suggestion is to degas the wine. Yeast don’t like pH 2.8 and probably would stall out at that level, ,,,, I will guess the starting juice was in the 3’s,,, and after degassing it will be 0.1 unit above where it started. CO2 will lower the pH as well as increase the TA.
* 11.5 grams is high for a dry wine but it isn’t high for a sweetened wine
* from a chemical point of view CaCO3 will reduce acid. What the store has is powdered limestone which will tend to settle out and be slow reacting so it’s better on juice. The flavor of calcium is “normal” where as if you use potassium it carries a bitter. The general process is tweak post ferment with potassium since it is fast, ,,, but not too much.
* chill it in the garage to crystallize tartrates
* a malic acid fermentation will drop the TA

2.8 was the pH i read before I started fermentation. I was using a pH test strip, so that value is far from accurate. I hope it was not too low for the fermentation to start. I will see at the weekend, when I am going to the vinyard again...

Potassium Carbonate is used post-fermentation. PC will reduce pH more than TA opposite of Calcium Carb

I still have some Calcium Carbonate somewhere around - can I also use this after fermentation?

Blauer Wildbacher: does this mean Blue Wild Badger like I think it does?

You're not that far: Blauer Wildbacher would mean "blue wild brooker" ;-)

I never did ML on any whites or rosés, because the fruitiness was important to me. Cool climate grapes have great varietal character and fruit, but most are not going to become the rich, soft California style wine (which I personally don't care for anyway) no matter what you do to it. I have found that ML can have a profound impact on the test and smell of the wine. This year I put one 9 gallon container of barber through ML and left the other without. Huge difference -the ML wine has lost so much of the fresh fruit character and (at this stage at least) tastes like a boring soft California supermarket wine (hopefully this will change). The "no ML" batch is vibrant and full of Barbera character.

That's what I suspected. Blauer Wildbacher has a distinctive note of red currant, when it is well made. That is a direction where I want to go, so I better skip the malolactic fermentation...

The Catawba sparkling wine had the cold treatment, but no sweetening because it needed to do a secondary fermentation in the bottle. Catawba is a grape that does well when made into a sparkling wine and also ages very well do to its body, acid and fruit character that doesn't fade easily. It's a great grape, but I highly doubt you will find this in Europe!

In terms of aging it was just that -letting the wine age on the bottle lees for years. Unlike real Champagne method I left the lees in the bottle and was just just careful about pouring it. It improved for ten years, and some of it may still be improving somewhere (I made a ton of wine so I gave a lot away). A friend showed up at my house the other day with a port style wine I made in 1997 -still drinking well!

You're right, you won't find Catawba in Europe. American varieties are usually only used as table grapes, and unless it's a very popular table grape you most propably won't get it anywhere... Interesting to read, that 10 years on the lees didn't have a negative influence on the taste. I would have guessed that this would lead to off-flavours... Did I get you right that you do all your sparkling wines without residual sugar content? So your sparkling wine was well drinkable at 10 g/l tartaric acid and almost zero residual sugar? Sounds incredible!


Thanks for all your comments! I will first wait for the end of the fermentation, add some lysozyme to suppress malolactic fermentation, chill the wine to remove some tartaric acid and then see if any further deacidification will be still necessary. I will update you about the process!

 

[Rice_Guy]

paper test strips are poor on any pigmented juice and fair with clear juice.

In the scheme of things the number means less than the taste, think back to grandpa before there were cheap pH meters. a second way to gague is by taste, was i tart like a sweet tart or gummy worm? if so it could be less than 3. Wine is hedonic, with the sugar fermented away is it sour like a lemon or rhubarb but drinkable, high 2’s or just at 3 pH.

a third way to gage is were the yellow jackets on the vines, yes it’s OK and NO let it ripen more