I work PT at a small winery and feel that the few minutes a week I get to spend with the winemaker are the greatest reward.
Today I learned about acidity in wine, how it can improve or correct a wine and the different types of acidity that can be added or not.
Malic, tartaric or citric. All are naturally occurring to some extent in grapes and they all will do different things.
As a wine drinker we are only privy to so much about how are the wines we drink are created. It’s fascinating.
It is fascinating - I agree. One must be a bit more careful with malic - if you end up going unfiltered, it can become a nasty pre-cursor for all kinds of crazy chemical reactions that are not good for the wine. Citric is interesting as well - definitely a different ‘feel’ than tartaric gives you.
But then again, none of us acidify as we all have enough natural acid with every wine every year, right?
Cheers
Yer’ dern tootin’ !
In the past century, red vinho verde used to occasionally blow up en route…
You just have to make sure there’s no malo left.
It’s always interesting to me seeing people talk about acidifying wine, when I spend most of my time worrying about quite the opposite.
I wrote an article last year that covered deacidification after fermentation.
It is truly amazing how different each acid tastes and feels in the mouth at varying levels.
Matt,
Where are you making wine? I do know areas where grapes simply do not ripen well enough to allow acid to fall to ‘acceptable’ levels. And of course there are some winemakers who choose to pick really really early to keep alcohol levels low.
Cheers
Northern Michigan. It’s not so much that the grapes don’t ripen, they do, the phenolic ripeness doesn’t always coincide with acid levels falling. So we have all kinds of fun tricks to reduce acid.
On reds, have you tried whole cluster to reduce the acidity? No sure your varietals do well with stems?
Whole cluster is a fantastic way to reduce acidity but also increase the overall tannin extraction in what otherwise is a tough world for tannins (namely cold climate reds).
Here’s the article I wrote last year if you’re interested, though it’s mainly focused on post-fermentation techniques.
So much this.
When I worked in wine retail in the early 2010’s I remember tasting many ripe and fruity inexpensive Shiraz wines that had a sort of disconnection to their very ripe and sunny, almost sweet fruit and remarkably zippy and fresh acidity. And then there was this subtle citrus fruit undercurrent running beneath the fruit. Although it is expected that virtually all inexpensive Australian mass-produced reds see some acid correction, that distinctive quality made it very easy to pinpoint when the acidity was adjusted with citric acid.
Interesting comments so far.
The taste test pictured in the photo in my first post used for a base wine our Cab, Merlot, Petit Verdot blend, the one we went to market with and that has NO added acidity.
The Tartaric made the fruit taste sweeter. Though the wine was fermented completely dry.
The Citric made the wine brighter.
The Malic, however, to me at least, made the wine taster bitter and more tannic.
Each year I make a full barrel of pinot and split the ~22 cases with my dad. I do 100% whole cluster year after year and find myself performing acid adjustments in the following summer after things warm up and malo completes. I set up a 10% solution of tartaric and water and add 1mL increments to 100mL glass of wine to increase the tartaric level by 1g/L. Its amazing how much the wine changes as you continue to increase the acidity. I usually set up 5 glasses and raise from 1g/L in one to 3g/L in the last glass. Sure the mouthfeel changes but What i find the most interesring is the perfume or aromas really scream from the glass as the acidity increases… That to me is the coolest part! Because i do this so late in the game i usually store the bottles a few years longer before diving into them to allow the acid to integrate as making additions just before bottling can def be sensed in the mouth shortly after. Acid is really the only thing I tinker with with wine. I do not experiment with any of the other dozens of wine additives. Anybody else see the wines aromas explode from the glass with acid adjustments?
Great article, Matt!
Big tartaric adjustments can end up with wine tasting metallic, or have a sort of an alkaline salinity. It tends to integrate better when you add it early on.
True - just like any ‘modifications’ with wine. If you have to do something post fermentation, something ‘went wrong’ . . .
Cheers.
Do it early if you have to. Also, unless you are sterile filtering both malic AND citric are good substrates (read: food) for organisms. I think you can get diacetyl (butter) from incomplete metabolism from citric acid. Grapes are one of the only fruits to accumulate Tartaric acid, which is not a substrate at wine pH. Tamarind is the only other fruit that comes close. We should all appreciate how great Tartaric Acid is for wine stabilization: our sine qua non.
I actually de-acidified a 2015 Stags Leap Cabernet (something like 1/8 g/L). The wine is showing amazingly well 6 years on!
I agree that if one is to monkey with acidity, it is best right after pressing whites or while still on skins for reds. If done later, it shows.
Sometimes, the wine is better for a major adjustment, like it or not. The first Riesling I ever made (1985) needed a double-salt deacidification after pressing. The pH was 2.7 and Brix was 22. This was CA.
2.7pH and 22 Brix are crazy numbers!