2013 Muscat, day 72, Dec 2 2013: testing

I tested the third of the wine that had the least topping off when we racked off the gross lees in October.

• SO2: 30/35 ppm.  Leaving this alone.  That's about the same reading I got on October 9 from the CB with the middling amount of topping off.  I'm questioning whether the Titrettes need replacing - I didn't mark them for an expiration date.  Might not have wondered this if not for the acid test, below.  The only SO2 adjustment so far was on Sep. 22 when I added about 30 ppm to everything.
• Acid: Well, the chem kit I have was purchased 13 months ago.  Maybe I need to change it.  If that's not the case, then our acid is off the scale - somewhere above .75% tartaric / 4.8 ppt sulphuric.  I vote for changing the chemicals.  We were at 4.32 on Sep. 24.
• pH: 3.43.  Sep. 24 measurement was 3.38.

2013 Muscat, Dec. 1 2013, day 71: 2nd racking

Moving the racking along.

I decided to keep the individual carboys consistent and not blend them together this racking, even though they all were topped off with different quantities of prior years' wines.  My expectations were for pretty minimal loss - the lees seemed a half inch thick and had something of a shaggy, dusty look, rather than a solid muddy look.  And I planned to test and taste a little later in the day.

OK, so something happened that I'd never seen before.  Two of the CBs, which had an inch or two of ait in their necks, overflowed their target CBs of (theoretically) exactly the same size.    Either they aren't really the same size, or a hell of a lot of air whipped up the volume of the wine (and that just didn't happen).  As I'm writing this now I realize that the reason I needed as much topping at the last racking was that I went into these slightly larger CBs from smaller ones.  I hate the idea, but I'll probably go back and measure and label all of the vessels.  Drag.

The third CB went into one of the two now cleaned source CBs.  Got an expected amount of loss.  Instead of topping off with old wine I used glass beads to displace about 200 ml. volume.

KC₄H₅O₆

In cleaning the CBs I saw that what I took to be dusty was actually lots of potassium bitartrate crystals.  We've gotten this in our Muscat before when storing it for long periods in the fridge, and I've seen it in commercial wine, but I don't think I've seen it before in our carboys.  I don't think it has to do with the cellar temperature, which is no different than in past years, but with our raising the acid in the must with tartaric acid this year, which we haven't done before.  So maybe when I test SO2 later today, it'll be interesting to test acid and pH, too.