2018 Wines - Chapter 4 - Traminette

This wine was trouble from the beginning. I don't mean starting with harvest, I mean starting with the decision to plant this grape. Since making that decision, we've sampled several Traminettes, mostly from southwest Michigan, and all have an overpowering floral, plumeria aroma of which we're not too fond. Fast forward to the 2018 harvest, where we originally intended to combine all of row 6. After sampling the Chardonel and Traminette together, we wound up picking them separately, only to find the Chardonel numbers pretty good but the Traminette number lousy.

My next mistake was attempting the so-called "double salt" technique to deacidify the wine. This involves adding the carbonate to a small portion of the must. The issue is that at lower pH, calcium and potassium carbonate pull out only tartaric acid. But if you get the pH up to 4.5 or better, you can pull out malic as well and supposedly keep the wine balanced. The trick is doing it without browning the wine. My Traminette is brown.

We started with 63# of grapes. I didn't write down the original numbers, but I used 22g K2CO3 with the double salt technique, leaving us with pH 2.83, TA 7.8, and 3.5 gallons of must. To that I added another 9g calcium carbonate, 3g Booster Blanc, 6g Opti White, 2t pectic, and 578g sugar to get the SG to 1.088. The pH came to 3.0, a more favorable environment for the 71B-1122 yeast, which hopefully will work on the malic acid. The must was step-fed in the usual manner with Fermaid K, and after a week fermenting it in a tub with ice packs, I moved it into a carboy at 1.040. A week later it was 1.030 and I finally had room in my chiller system. Three weeks on, it hit 1.018 and I brought it out and let it come up to room temperature.

In the event the color on this wine remains brown, I have some Polyclar to try to clear it up.