Why Add Water???

In my opinion, the adding of water is necessary to balance out high acids (especially in berry wines) or to lower the highly flavourful component of certain fruits (or grapes) to achieve a desired wine style. For example, a dry or off-dry table berry wine will need more dilution than a port style of liqueur style of the same fruit as the end result wanted will be a less intense, lower acid product.

Marc

Some grapes need water for balance. Around here Catawba and Concord rarely if ever are made without adding water. It's done more to bring the acid in line but these grapes are just very flavorful, you need to tone therm down a bit. It's not uncommon to add 20% water/sugar to Labrusca grapes. Niagara and Diamond are less trouble that way but a lot of grapes grown in rhe NorthEastern US grapes get some water rather than chemically reducing the acids.

Joe

And if you want to lower the acidity without diluting the fruit intensity, one can add calcium carbonate or potassium carbonate or Acidex to neutralize some of the acid (up to about 0.4% reduction). This chemical method of acid reduction raises the pH, so one has to watch the pH. The pH increase is more with potassium carbonate than with calcium carbonate. A references credited to Presque Isles for this process that include more good information and tips can be found at:

Gene

Marc Godard wrote:

Back in the day, Ben Rotter and Jack Keller debated this topic. As I remember it, Jack argued that many fruits had an overpowering flavor that would have been more like alcoholic fruit juice than wine if undiluted. Ben felt that most fruit could make very good full flavored wine and that the idea of using 2-4 lb of fruit and a gallon of water was more about economy. I don't think it's about acid, as most country wine recipes call for adding water, sugar, *and* acid. Ben has a great web site too, check it out at:

I was just about to suggest searching the archive for this thread, but I can't find it anymore. In fact, all my Google Groups searches this morning turned up results from this year only. I know I used to be able to find threads from many years past; has there been some change in the archive that I missed? Some preference that I need to set?

Anyway, I made blueberry and cherry wine, last year, as though they were red wine. That is, I crushed the fruit, added sugar to SG 1.090, and fermented. I haven't bottled yet, but they seem promising.

Erroll

Good comments Erroll. It does seem strange that water is added to reduce acidty but then most recipes also call for the addition of acid. Has anyone else made fruit wines using chemical acid adjustment without adding water? If so, how did it turn out? Was the fruit overpowering as the rumor goes??? And finally, I assume adding water will raise the pH. Do most fruit wines start with a low pH and adding water conveniently brings it into balance or is pH typically ok to begin with and must then be lowered (chemically?) after adding water? If so, it just seems like your trading one evil for another. Perhaps pH is the lesser of two evils...

I think you are looking for simple answers where there aren't any. An apple ain't an orange, a lemon ain't a grape, and I can't get much juice from a dandylion. And while I might drink fresh pressed apple juice without modification, I certainly wouldn't want lemonade made from straight lemon juice. A lot of ifs, ands, and buts.

Hmmmmmmm....... Maybe you could look at it this way: The fruit/flower/whatever is only there for the flavor. You decide how intense you want the flavor to be for the style of wine you want to make, and adjust for that. Then, consider the alcohol/acid as seperate issues. In order for a wine to "keep" (not spoil), alcohol and acid have to fall within certain ranges. Alcohol needs to be greater than 9%, and acid should be between ~3.2 to3.6 pH. So you adjust for that.

The trick comes in assembling a must which meets all of these criteria. Since folks don't usually brag about their mistakes, it's pretty safe to assume that the recipes you find were successfully done at one time or another by the writer. And the writer decided that the outcome was good enough to be passed on.

As Jack Keller once said here: "...cooks follow recipes, chefs create their own...."

HTH

Frederick

It's still working, I found that thread under a search for 'amelioration'.

Joe

Nicely said. OT, I make a Limoncello that is well liked; I think it goes over well because I use a lot of lemon zest for flavor and color. The rest of it is cheap vodka and cane sugar. It's all about balance, like most things.

Joe

at:

Does this really work the same way for fruit wines? Lot of fruits have no tartaric acid, I believe I've read somewhere the chemical acid reduction methods work predominantly on tartaric acid...?

Thx,

Pp

pH scale is logarithmic, so water will have negligible effects on the must pH when you're making wine.

Pp

Also, one thing I remember from that discussion is that because of different acid composition in fruits vs. grapes, the pH and TA behave differently during the fermentation for fruit wines - the bottom line being that the TA levels can/should be lower (pH higher) for fruit wines than for grape wines to get a similar result.

Pp

Blueberry Wine? Sounds delicious. Hope it turns out good.

I agree that many fruits are too acidic if used undiluted. What I have never understood about most recipies is why they would have you dilute the fruit juice and then add acid to the recipe. To me, the ideal way would be to test the acidity as you dilute it and only dilute it till the acidity is where you want it and then NOT add any more acid. Any one see aq problem with this?

Ray

Sounds good to me but I did that on a mead and screwed it up. It turns fermentation of honey converts more acids that fermentation of grapes so my pH went from 3.5 to 2.8 post fermentation. That's where I learned to listen to my tongue before listening to my electronics...

On the acid reduction comment related to tartaric, those carbonates prefer tartaric but eat malic too.

Joe

What about citric?

Pp

I'm a mechanical engineer by day so I commonly suffer from analysis paralysis. I suppose I should concentrate more on being a chef. Thanks for the reality check!

Hi Carles E

All I meant here was that a wine (and therefore the must) has to be ballanced, so we can't consider just one aspect of the problem to the exclusion of all else. Maybe if I ramble on a bit here the folks in the group might find my comments helpful.

The major things that have to be considered are:

1. Flavor - (type(s) and stylistic intensity)
2. Sugar/alcohol - (quantity by concentration)
3. Acid - (types and quantity by concentration)

A procedure I sometimes used when starting with an unfamiliar base (fruit) was as follows:

Starting with the base I would check the sugar (SG/PA). I would then adjust the sugar by addition or dilution to get the desired concentration to give me the end alcohol I wanted. (usually 11-12PA). I would then make up a sugar water solution of the same concentration. This allowed me to continue dilution (if necessary) without changing the sugar concentration of the must.

Second, I would check the acid. If this was too low I knew I would have to add some later but I would want to do this as a last step since the additions are small and have minimal impact on the volume of the must. However, if the acid was too high, I would continue diluting using the sugar water solution until I had the acid down to something manageable. It should be remembered here that chemical reduction of acids results in the formation of salts which remain in the wine and have their own charactoristics (flavors) which can adversly effect the wine if their concentration rises above the level of perception. Clear as mud, right ?? Anyway, control acids by dilution whenever possible and keep chemical adjustments to a minimum.

Third, I would then turn my attention to the stylistic intensity of flavor I might want. Maybe an intense desert wine requiring no further dilution. Maybe a medium off dry wine that would require a little more dilution. Or maybe a light dry table wine that would require even more dilution. Of course this should have been determined before I started because if I have to dilute to get the flavor intensity where I want it, it would also impact the acid concentration. So - these two steps actually have to be played one against the other. Again, clear as mud, right ??

Lastly I would turn my attention to making any acid additions (if necessary) to finally bring the must into ballance.

Certainly not the only way to skin a cat, but I found it useful......

HTH

Frederick

PS - Please excuse all the typos. Didn't have time to edit.......

That is what I do now with one qualification. I get the sugar balanced and _taste_ before I work the acids.

I threw taste in there from painful experience. You would think a book from Penn State on winemaking would be a reliable source of information when making Strawberry wine for the first time, right? I did. Well, like an idiot I did not question the huge addition of citric acid they indicated and just dumped it in. The typo in the ingredient list became obvious once I tasted it. They meant teaspoons, not tablespoons. The good news was that instead of making

5 gallons of strawberry, I made 15. That's 75 bottles of sweet wine; I don't really drink sweet wines often; that was the bad news.

The moral of the story is it's your wine; even if you have never made wine before either verify the recipe is correct from someone who has followed it or proceed with caution when adding things that have a major impact on flavor. I would consider those to be water, sugar and acid. It never hurts to measure out what you need and add it 1/3 at a time, tasting in between. The must should not be cloyingly sweet unless you want a sweet wine in the end; it should not taste like lemonade either. Another benefit of tasting is training you palate, even if you guess wrong and have to adjust things later, the next time you have a benchmark to work from. Your taste buds are probably the most important tool you have when making wine.

Joe