Cold Stabilization & Filtering
White wine is almost always cold stabilized and filtered. Cold stabilization of red wine as shown here is less common.
Seeded Wine Undergoing Cold Stabilization at 25 deg. F
Cold stabilization involves holding wine at around 25 deg. F for a few weeks to get the bitartate crystals to form (seeding of the crystals can also be done). Once cold stabilized the wine is racked (or syphoned off of the bitartrate crystals), that mean these crystals will not form in the bottle and also reduces the acidity by percipitating tartaric acid. Here these red wine were deemed to be slightly acidic (hence prononcing the effects of the tannin in the wine), so I opted for cold stabilization as a “natural” way to reduce the acid.
Potassium Bitartrate Precipitation Reducing Titratable Acidity (TA)
Filtering of red wine is really a wine making choice especially if aged properly, which our wines have. But given, alot of my favorite red wines do not throw any sediment means to me that they are at least performing a polish filtering before bottling. So I opted to do the same with a really loose 1 micron crossflow filter.
1 micron Cross-flow Filtration for Polishing Red Wine