I made some Zin this year to make some mistakes and learn from them. Mistakes were made. ABV came in very high at 17.5% with 3g/L RS remaining. I ended up with a full barrel and a full 15.5 Gal. keg after press.
I did my calculations for water additions to bring everything down to 16% but I believe I messed up the proportions and I now have a barrel and a keg at different ABVs. Since ML has been very sluggish in both vessels I now want to drop the alcohol again down to 15-15.5%. I want to homogenize the barrel and keg so the I can get an accurate ABV measurement, but I am worried about exposing the wine to too much oxygen and causing VA levels to rise. It was already at about 1 g/L Acetic after the primary halted itself.
I’m looking for suggestions on how to get a proper sample to measure ABV. I’ll take any other suggestions on how to remedy the situation and get a speedy ML completion.
i learned some lessons about how how uneven Zin ripeness can be…4 days into fermentations and my brix was still increasing. You live and you learn
If you only need a representative sample, just take a proportional volume from each vessel according to its size and combine them. If your barrel is 60 gallons, for example, take 80 mL from that and 20 mL from your keg.
Wow this is a painfully simple solution lol I feel silly. Inoculated for ML. Going off chromatography it was about halfway through 2 weeks ago. Some VA is okay I’m just worried about it getting out of hand before I’m able to add SO2
What do you inoculate with? It’s half way through but is it moving? I would generally expect an inoculated MLF to finish in 2-4 weeks if your temp is above 60.
Ill have to ask the winemaker which one specifically he ordered but it was a strain that is resilient to lower pH. The high alcohol seems to be slowing it down considerably