Homemade Catawba Wine, part 2.

A good wine has a nice balance of flavor, color and aroma, though many factors contribute to the ‘flavor’.  The mouth-feel of the wine, the bitterness, sweetness, how sour it tastes or how these flavors work together (Is there umami flavor in wine?).  In order to contribute to the sour or sharp aspect of a wine, the proper acidity must be maintained and in order to do so, some simple chemistry must be done, with ease from an acid titration kit

Step 1: purchase the acid titration kit.  It will come with a liquid concentration of NaOH, sodium hydroxide, a large syringe, a small cup and a small bottle of liquid phenolphthalein.  You should ALSO purchase Acid blend, which is a blend of Malic, Citric and Tartaric acid (all found naturally in grapes or occur naturally during fermentation).

Step 2:  take a small sample (follow the directions of your  titration kit, but these are the general procedure.. mine asks  for 15 ml of wine) and put it in the small measuring cup  provided.  Add three drops of phenolphthalein to the liquid  and swirl a little bit to mix.  At this point, take your syringe  and take some NaOH (mine calls for 10ml) and begin  dropping into the wine/phenolphthalein mixture.  Do so  slowly and swirl every now and again.  For white wine, you’ll  see the liquid change to a pinkish color, for red wine it’s  more of a blueish, purply color.  add NaOH a few drops at a  time, being sure to give time to let the color change and either remain the same color or darken with new drops.  Once the liquid stops changing color with the addition of new NaOH, you have basically brought the pH to 7 and have a neutral liquid.

Step 3: Look at the amount of NaOH you have used.  For me testing my wine last night, I used about 7ml of the 10ml total.  This converts using my kit to about .70% acidity, when I wanted it around .80%.  So, to bring the acidity up, I mixed in slightly less than a teaspoon of Acid Blend to the wine.  1 teaspoon is equal to about .15% acid, so I went for less than a teaspoon, but basically eye balled it.

And that’s it!  I will test the acidity again in a few months to make sure we’re on track.  To bring a wine back from a high pH, from what I’ve read it’s a little but more complicated with calculations and such, but if I encounter this problem, I will certainly tell you all about it!  My father once made blue wine by miscalculating the acidity and making about a pH of 7 wine from a batch of red wine he was making.  The color quickly corrected itself after the pH was adjusted to be more proper!  As for the wine, times like these where you open the carboy up and check the inside will be few and far between, since you want to keep it away from the air and oxygen, so take these chances to take tiny amounts of wine for tasting to get an idea of what you’ve made.  All I can say from last night is this wine had a fruity, floral aroma, but I need to see how the flavor develops over time, especially with this extra acid content.