Murky Chardonnay

It sounds like an oxidation problem, did you keep it away from air and did you sulfite? Juice comes presulfited, usually at 100 ppm free.

My Riesling is too dark from last year by the way, it's from juice out of the central valley of California. It's good, but I expect to use it up in a year. I tried fining with Polyclar and filtering and it made very little difference on mine too.

Joe

try egg whites

Stephen SG

As a confirmed member of the "brown juice" camp, I don't add any sulfite at crush to clean, healthy grapes. The juice oxidizes to a murky brown, but during fermentation all the brown stuff drops out of the wine. Then when fermentation is complete I sulfite the wine to normal levels. The resulting wine is an almost iridescent greenish straw colored wine that has less potential for oxidation.

Polyclar is pretty ineffective at removing browning from wine. It works much better on _juice_.

Tom S

Tom, I did that on my northern whites and it came out just as you say. That must was a scary brown though...

I wouldn't agrue that, it did nothing for me on the wine. I still don't understand the color, it tastes fine but looks about 4 years old.

I used AR2000 right after fermentation, I usually do that much nearer bottling but wanted to avoid the extra fining step. (I usually fine whites with bentonite about a month or so after primary.) This year I may change some of that process.

Joe