Someone posted here a couple of years ago that they did it this way. I couldn’t really figure out a good reason to do it that way. That’s why I don’t!
Two birds with one hose?
Ah crap. Well, interested to see how things turn out. Added water without bleeding off any juice with the Syrah. Grapes were pretty dehydrated, so fingers crossed.
I added water to my livermore Grenache that came in at 30 brix. Acidity was higher than I was expecting and the pH wasn’t too bad either. Fruit was far from dehydrated. The clusters were huge, so wondering if the water addition will hurt this with a lower skins/juice ratio.
Made it 100% whole cluster. Foot treaded, cold soaked and inoculated with RC212.
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Tim, did you acidulate the water before you added it? Remember that water by itself is much higher pH than your must or wine, so you’ll raise the pH if you add water without acid. Rule of thumb is to add about 26g of tartaric acid per gallon of water to bring the acidity of the water into range of your must/wine.
Yup, did one thing right I guess ![[wow.gif]](/uploads/db3686/original/2X/7/7d450e9830889c8943b674446a21b7254cad657e.gif "wow"){kind=small}
Well, with the dehydrated Syrah, if the water add was equivalent to the water that had been lost, then you just normalized the skin to juice ratio. So, in that case, it might have been a good thing.
I assume you watered the Grenache back quite a bit. And be prepared to add DAP, RC212 isn’t very tolerant of low Nitrogen fruit which anything pretty much is at 30 Brix.
Wes, that makes me feel better about the Syrah, worse about the Grenache. But the Grenache was a small lot and lower cost fruit, so I’m good with screwing it up. The Syrah is from monte rosso, don’t want that screwed up.
Steve - I only added enough water to target 27-27.5 brix, half way in between my more ideal of 25 or so brix. I’m good with Grenache being higher alcohol. I did add a little DAP and some yeast nutrients.