Gravitational Clarification

Boooo.....Hisssss! ;)

This comment has helped me as I have often felt this is a sign of failure. Yet another thing I have learned from this group. Thanks

Something I've begun doing recently is to =bump= my carboys gently as the wine settles. It seems to cut down on the amount of yeast clinging to the sides of the glass carboy and makes it settle better, end result is clearer.

I give my carboys a sharp twist (1/4 turn) several times while clearing. This will set a bit of current going that will strip stuff off the sides that might cling to it, so that it can fall to the bottom.

Ray

Clyde, you have made these points before. Most of what I have read about making wine at home has talked about the probability of striping things out of the wine when you fine or filter -- as if it was something to do as a last resort. You have really got me thinking. Do you have any suggestions on fining programs that might positively effect the wine in ways other than clearing it? In other words, specific benefits for different types of fining agents?

Ray

Here's a good place to start Ray:

Personally, I've been able to do most of my fining in the juice stage, and it's typically 100 bloom gelatin with a silica gel counter fining. Juice fining is considerbly better for the wine, having much less effect on the finished positive organoleptic qualities of the wine. Rates on the order of ~1 gram per gallon of gelatin for free run, and up to 4 grams per gallon on the press fraction are my typical regimen.

Those levels would wipe out a finished wine. Occasionally I will polish fine a wine at levels as *high* as 0.05 grams per gallon, but that's getting to be a rare occasion.

Silica gel is used in proportion to the gelatin from 0.3 mls per gallon up to 1 ml per gallon. These are high figures for what's recommended, but I like the results. It's relatively benign to the wines character and mainly pulls out the gelatin. I have reason to believe it's doing some other positive things but have nothing but notion to support that.

Sometimes a wine, like Traminette that's been cold soaked, will end up with some nagging bitter notes. Levels of gelatin that will remove this seem to damage the wine, so I'll use PVPP instead, which seems to act rather benign to the other wine qualities at recommended levels.

One other agent I'm fond of (at least it's results; it's a bear to work with) is potassium casienate (some people use powder milk as a substitute). It works rather well at toning down over oaked whites without touching the fruit components.

I find doing lab trials to be one of the most challenging parts of winemaking, but am highly convinced that it can do a wine serious justice. Too many people on the outskirts of the industry are ready to make accusations that commercial winemaking techniques are only designed to get the wine to market. Though there are some wineries that have that mindset (usually mega monsters), I think you'd find that the majority have a much greater passion for their work and their wines than to sacrafice quality over productivity.

Trevor made a comment earlier in this thread about not messing too much with the wine. I very much believe in this too, and as I develop my skills and technique for this particular winery, I get much better at doing very specific steps to get the wine to the bottle. That's not to the shelf mind you; I have a handful of reasons to get wine bottled timely that may not apply to other wineries or winemakers. But anyway, once fermentation is done, I do a racking within about 10 days, then the wine sits for a couple of months, then it gets fined, then cold stablized, then filtered and most styles that I make are then ready to bottle. This of course is the procedure for my "white" wines. I rarely if ever fine my reds.