Les Blog

With fresh reference samples of some acids to work with, I put all four wines through paper chromatography yesterday [what the heck is "paper cro-magni-wha...?": more background here]. Bask in the aurora borealitic results above.

To the left, along the baseline and on top of those tiny X’s, I placed drops of tartaric, malic and lactic acid, spaced about an inch apart. You’ll note that directly above them there are balloon-like blobs, some closer to the baseline, others closer to the top of the page. If a wine has any of those acids in it, we’d expect to see a blob about the same distance up the page above its X. Crude? Yes. Beautiful? Oh, yeah.

So take a look at the blobs to the right, above drops of the Franc, Cab, Merlot and Pinto. Drawing a horizontal line from the reference blobs on the left, you can see that all of our wines have tartaric acid (not surprisingly), and all have lactic acid. That the Franc, Cab and Merlot don’t have a blob at the malic latitude suggests that all the malic acid in those wines has been converted to lactic acid, so we can assume that malolactic fermentation has finished. Or, in non-science speak, these wines are done fermenting and are more or less safe to bottle without risk of further CO₂ bubble production, popping corks down the line and embarrassing Garagistes at parties.

On the far right, however, the Pinto does show some kind of blob at the malic level, though it’s not especially distinct. I took the pH of all our wines prior to running the test (you can see those numbers next to the names), and the Pinto was just a hair above 3, which is pretty acidic (the typical range of wine hits between 3.3 and 3.6). So my guess would be that that much acid has inhibited malolactic fermentation, slowing its progress through this wine. That said, I remember the Pinto tasting great (and not “acidic”), so I’m not sure what to make of or do with this result. Is malo stuck, or simply taking its time? Dunno.

In any case, the reason I ran the test in the first place is for the Franc, whose results indicate malolactic is over and we can therefore trust the acid numbers we got earlier. So in the next day or so, I’ll be adding SO₂ and some acid to try to perk up our old friend.

The additives that proved so successful this year:

Recipe
10 gal. water, warm
25 lbs. sugar
115 g tartaric acid
80 g yeast nutrient
40 g diamonium phosphate (DAP)
05 g calcium citrate

Makes 12 gal total or scale as needed. Water temperature between 70F and 90F will make the yeast feel welcome and helps the sugar dissolve. Yeast nutrient is nutritional yeast, the same as that sold for humans at the grocery store. Diamonium phosphate is a nitrogen fertilizer. Some yeasts need more than others but a little extra is better than not enough. The tartaric acid could be another acid, even lemon juice or an acid blend. Yeast is happy in an acidic environment and most bacteria are not. If for red wine the acid addition would be 230 g to give the correct acidity in the finished beverage. Calcium is needed for yeast reproduction. If the water has less than 15 ppm calcium you need to add some. You can also use calcium carbonate (shells, antacid) or calcium sulfate (plaster of paris).

General formula in grams per liter:
1000 water
300 sugar
3 tartaric acid (6 for wine)
2 yeast nutrient
1 DAP
.1 calcium citrate

Makes 1.2 liter

Last weekend we pressed the Cabernet to glad cries: the stuff tasted positively fantastic. Deep, resonant fruit accentuated by a high-def backbone of acid and tannin. Delicious. Can’t wait to see how it matures and fleshes out in the barrel, but my guess is that we won’t have too many votes to blend this one entirely away.

For the next few months, this baby will hang its hat in a one-year-old Remond Allier MT. Unlike previous years, we’re going to try to keep the wines (Cab, Franc, Merlot) in the same barrel, rather than racking between barrels more or less indiscriminately. With luck, we’ll get more of a sense of what these barrels do to a wine (though of course, different varietals in different barrels will make cross-comparison impossible).

We also pressed the Merlot the week before. There’s a line in Shakespeare’s The Winter’s Tale where someone advises a homely shepherdess comically convinced of her beauty, “Sell when you can. You are not for all markets.” That’s a bit like the Merlot, at least for the moment. At first blush, it’s a lovely wine to smell, but ultimately, that may be its most comely attribute. There’s decent structure (mostly from acid, as opposed to tannin), and nice fruit, but at least for me, it lost interest and went back to filing its nails somewhere around mid palate. Hopefully that will improve with some time in the fine, French oak pied-à-terre we got for it (a Gillet 2006 Allier MT).

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Will punch down sometime in the evening