Ph?

You are fine at 3.7. If you have not cold stabilized the wine it may creep up (if and/or when you do) though and may necessitate an acid addition before bottling.

that is of course, if you used tartaric acid or any grape concentrate or raisins. If not, cold stabilization probabally will not do anything.

That depends. What type of fruit. Some fruit wines just do not age very long. If you are going to drink it in 2 years it is probably fine. If you plan to keep it 3+ years then generally you should consider taking it down to 3.5 or lower.

Ray

It's orange wine

I have made orange wine one time about 3 or 4 years ago. It seems to keep fairly well. But mine came out very acidic, If I remember right pH about

3.2. Generally, the lower the pH, the longer it will keep and the less sulfite needed. You know, I really need to pull a bottle of it and try it again. It was not my favorite but not bad.

Ray

Iv'e made 3 versions now and think I'm closing in on what I want. The last one I used 100% juice + some white grape juice, no added water. Took 1 # sugar per gal for a starting 1.095. Adjusted with acid blend. Am about to try one adjusted with more tartaric acid to get a lower starting Ph. Am also going to oak it a little. When one has a orange tree it's easy to play around.

I'm curious how you ended up with pH at 3.7 if you used only orange and grape juice - I would expect it to be much lower, especially with added acid. Did you measure the pH and TA before fermentation?

Pp

Pp

It ended up where it started. I did the acid blend to .60% first and the Ph wound up at 3.7 (using paper). The oranges are Amber Sweet and really are sweet. On a previous batch I adjusted with only tartaric and wound up with a Ph of 2.7, thats why I'm going to do another batch and use acid blend + more tartaric. Also I want to use some oak. Maybe my acid blend just buffers higher than some. BTW the all tartaric wine turned out great. The cold stabilization droped out some of the tartaric. At one month it doesn't taste to bad. At one year it should be great.

Ok, that's interesting. I'm not familiar with that type of oranges. All the fruit wines I've made so far would have been way too acidic if not significantly diluted with water, so it's interesting to see a counterexample. Ben Rotter had a post here a while back talking about acid management in fruite wines - the gist being the acid levels behave significantly differently during the ferment and aging than grape wines, you might want to look it up for general interest. I usually end up with low pH and high acid and have to sweeten up a bit.

What do you want to achieve with oak in this case?

Pp

Crhoff wrote:

On the oak, I tried a couple of drops of liquid oak in a sample of the wine and liked the effect, so thought I'd give it a try. Am gonna trrow the yeast in the new batch tonite.

Litmus paper is not accurate enough to distinquish the pH of wine. You'd be better off guessing what it might be.

clyde