What a difference pH makes!

[Boatboy24]

Over last weekend, I adjusted the pH on my 3 carboys of Touriga Nacional. It's amazing what a little change in chemistry does. This is a young (2019) wine, but was seemingly clear. A few days after the addition of the tartaric, tons of sediment on the sides and bottom of the carboys.

This is why I always let my blends sit for a month or so after blending - not only to let things meld a bit, but to allow for any 'fallout' as a result of the change in chemistry.

 

[Jbu50]

Wow. I just experienced the same thing for the first time and searched the forum and found this older thread that nobody expanded upon. I had 4 carboys of my 2020 cabernet sauvignon that was clear as a bell. I blended them all together into a tank and made a tartaric acid addition. About a month later I went to bottle and was SHOCKED to find tons of sediment afterwards at the bottom of the tank! Is this really a thing that happens with tartaric acid additions?

 

[cmason1957]

When you add tartaric acid (and really just about anything) you change the chemistry of a system, it can lead to fallout. Was it truly sediment or was it just some of the tartaric acid dropping out, similar to what happens during cold stabilization?

 

[Jbu50]

When you add tartaric acid (and really just about anything) you change the chemistry of a system, it can lead to fallout. Was it truly sediment or was it just some of the tartaric acid dropping out, similar to what happens during cold stabilization?

...was a faint pink colored mush that started to cake on the bottom. Did not look in any way like those crystal diamond things...

 

[Jbu50]

I'm starting to think that a pH adjustment probably isn't the cause of my sediment drop-out because I had a couple of jugs of wine on the side that didn't get a pH adjustment which had the same sediment drop-out. I'm thinking that the sediment may have been caused by blending various treated wines together, i.e. one carboy came from a barrel, another carboy had an oak spiral, another carboy had a dose of cellaring tannin, last carboy had no treatment. Maybe it was the blending of all these carboys that caused a sediment drop out even though each of the carboys showed no sediment prior to blending. The other factor may be a change in temperature - my cold room went from 21C in September to about 14C in November. But, having said that, in previous years I've never experienced such a drop out in the fall with one year old wine with this kind of temperature change.

 

[winemaker81]

@Jbu50, I'd suspect "all of the above". Blending wines may produce unexpected results, such as sediment in dropping from formerly clear wines. I've noticed that the temperature dropping below 60 F / 15.6 C seems to make a difference as well.