Aluminum or Stainless Steel?

Commercial wineries are NOT as clean as you might think. Rats, mice, birds, BUGS in the grapes oh yeah lots of bugs sometimes.

Mike

Reminds me of the first time I saw a crush here in OR. Lots and lots of yellowjackets divebombing the crushed grapes as they came out and getting tangled up in the goo. When one of the open tanks was full they just dumped in some sulfite and stirred it in along with the wasps.

They also had a pet pig (a little one, potbelly?) that lounged under the crusher lapping up grape juice as it leaked out here and there.

Their wine was quite good.

--arne

Stainless Steel is probably better, Acids can attack Aluminum over time and you can end up with a little in your wine. Same thing can happen to Stainless Steel, or any metal for that matter, but Stainless is a little more resistant to acid etching than aluminum.

Now, as to why you might want to consider heating the must when a few crushed Campden tablets will do the job nicely of sterilizing the must. What if you, a member of your family, or friend that wants to imbibe your wine has an allergy or sensitivity to Sulfites? Pasteurization will somewhat affect the flavor of the wine, but it is one way of sterilizing the must without using sulfites. I have done it myself, and made some very satisfactory wine with this method.

The OP was really referring to beer, I think, where a boil of anywhere from 60 minutes to 4 hours (70-90 minutes typical) is standard practice. Note also that at the time of the boil, beer is considerably less acidic than wine (pH 5.2-5.4), although after fermentation pH can drop down to around 4 or so. Either stainless or aluminum are fine as wort (pre-beer) boiling vessels -- Al is just harder to clean.

The original message was crossposed to brewing, meadmaking and wine groups -- probably not a great idea. I trimmed the ngs a tiny bit.