Water treatment for wine / TC

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stitch
Steady Drinker
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Joined: Wed May 06, 2009 9:46 am
Location: Bristol

Water treatment for wine / TC

Post by stitch » Fri Jul 27, 2012 11:04 am

I've recently started to use water treatment for the beers I make. It's fairly simple at the moment, and that's probably the best way to keep it.

My water is very hard (Bristol) and often smells quite strongly of chlorine. To get rid of the chlorine I bung half a campden tab in my water (usually 30L or so). For stouts and porters that's it, nothing more. For bitters, IPAs and fake lagers I use CRS to reduce the alkalinity to 30mg/L.

I also make wine and have been doing this very happily for a few years with water direct from the tap. But thinking about water for beer has made me think about water for wine. Standard grape wine is made only from the juice of the grape, which is rain water filtered through the vine itself. Rain water, as I understand it, is very soft and contains few minerals, unlike my tap water.

I have looked around the Internet to see if I could find any information on water treatment for wine, but couldn't find any.

Does anybody here treat their water at all? And if so, what do you do?

Would it make sense to use CRS to reduce alkalinity? Maybe then use phosphoric or citric acid to aim for a particular pH?

Does anyone have any thoughts? Or am I overcomplicating things?
stitch

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