Dinner with Abe Schoener

originally posted by abe schoener:

We never add SO2 to increase acidity. I have never contemplated it, nor calculated nor experimented to get a sense of how much one would have to add to modulate acidity. The stuff that we use is furiously low pH, so it would have to have an effect-- but it is also true that the highest sulfur add I have ever made was 100 ppm, or 100 grams of S02 per 1000 liters of wine (a 1% add would be 100 grams per 10 liters by comparison). The adds are small but very powerful.
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That makes perfect sense. Although SO2 is a strong acid, the quantities used won't affect the overall acidity overmuch.

Mark Lipton's question still stands: why in the world support the use of a toxic chemical that can be shipped only under permit and must be dispensed with a gas mask, when I "rail" (perhaps that is a little strong!) against the use of crystal tartaric (derived from fruits and vegetables in China; a very sustainable by-product of making fruit syrups, beet sugar, and other totally natural products)?
I think that there are 3 reasons:
1) I do not like the short or long term gustatory effect of using tartaric, though I like both in SO2;
2) there is nothing clever about opening bags of tartaric, but working with the microbes and guiding the wines up to the edge of the cataclysm is cool;
3) though there is nothing cool about working with a toxic substance that comes out of a steel container, the effect of SO2 on wine is amazing; whereas the effects of tartaric are predictable and seem pedestrian. That is why I can never allow our winemaking to be called "low intervention" simply. Some of the techniques are (no inocculation); some of the wines depend only on such techniques (the chardonnays); but some of the wines depend on the use of SO2 and other relatively powerful non-spontaneous activities. I love and marvel at effect of S02. I can easily imagine making a lot of good wines without it (I did for about 6 years), but I love the wines that I have learned to make with it, and, in some slightly perverse way, look forward to making sulfur additions.
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That explanation makes sense. I can't argue with your own taste, after all.

Mark Lipton
 
originally posted by abe schoener:

and I stand corrected.
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Oh, don't go so quietly.

But I do have really fond memories of the first few months I worked with elemental fluorine, F2, out of a cylinder. The stuff is so reactive (for instance, water burns in an atmosphere of fluorine the way gasoline burns in an atmosphere of air) that you have to think of every surface it will touch and consider, what will happen to that patch there? Also, you can't just vent it out the hood, you have to let it go slowly through calcium carbonate so you tie up the fluoride rather than blowing it down wind. And the final trick was that it is only incompletely condensable by liquid nitrogen, so its handling was additionally complex in ways I won't bore you with.

And that's just the mechanics. I've found plenty of intellectual excitement at the other end of a pressure regulator too.
 
originally posted by SFJoe:


And that's just the mechanics. I've found plenty of intellectual excitement at the other end of a pressure regulator too.
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I had a big, orange USII pressure regulator in college. Lots of intellectual excitement came from that.
 
originally posted by kirk wallace:
originally posted by SFJoe:


And that's just the mechanics. I've found plenty of intellectual excitement at the other end of a pressure regulator too.
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I had a big, orange USII pressure regulator in college. Lots of intellectual excitement came from that.
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Was it manufactured by Graffix? I think I had one of those, too.
 
originally posted by John Roberts:
originally posted by kirk wallace:
originally posted by SFJoe:


And that's just the mechanics. I've found plenty of intellectual excitement at the other end of a pressure regulator too.
Click to expand...

I had a big, orange USII pressure regulator in college. Lots of intellectual excitement came from that.
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Was it manufactured by Graffix? I think I had one of those, too.
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No, I don't think so. I actually thought US acrylics or something was the company that made them, or that held the patent. Just a big acrylic, double chambered (hence the II) job.
 
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