What You Should Know About Acid Blend

BlueStem Winery opened for business in mid-2004 selling a complete line of beer brewing ingredients and supplies for making wine. One of the items we purchased from our wholesaler was their acid blend product.

Without the appropriate level of acid wines can taste stale (flat) so it is important during the winemaking process to check acid levels and adjust to the recommended level. There are typically three types of acid used to prepare the typical acid blend. Our wholesaler was using 50% Citric Acid, 40% Malic Acid and 10% Tartaric Acid.

I used this mix myself when doing some home wine making from fruit and thought that my wines tasted a little too much like a grapefruit or a lemon. I did some on-line investigation and discovered rather easily that acid blend has changed a little over the years. Years ago acid blend was typically made with a 50/50 mix of Tartaric and Malic Acids or a 40/40/20 blend of Tartaric, Malic and Citric Acids. Why the change?

In an effort to control costs the Acid Blend was made using a much larger amount of Citric Acid and less of the Tartaric Acid which is the more expensive of the three acids.

BlueStem Winery started blending its own mix of Acid Blend for wine making shortly after that. Our Acid Blend is a 50/40/10 blend of Tartaric, Malic and Citric acids. A little costlier to prepare but with the makings for a much better wine.

BlueStem Winery is a licensed and bonded winery with (at present) a total of six BlueStem label wines for sale: Once in a Blue Moon is our Riesling dessert wine, Red Crescent is our Cabernet Franc dessert wine, Dark Side is a dry Montepulciano, Prairie Fire is our off-dry Riesling, Feelin' Groovy is an off-dry Gruner Veltliner, and Crystal Moon is our Gewurztraminer dessert wine. We will have an off-dry Gewurztraminer, a Late Harvest Riesling and a Blush Zinfandel on the wine racks before summer's end.

BlueStem presently carries wine making kits from both Cellar Craft and WinExpert and a very nice line of beer making kits, brewing equipment and everything else you need for home beer brewing. We are looking to expand our line-up of wine kits by slightly expanding our line Cellar Craft wine kits, greatly expanding the number of Winexpert kits that we inventory plus possibly carrying the Mosti Mondiale line of 23 liter pure juice wine kits. We will also be expanding our line of brewing supplies later in 2009 as we finish our new warehouse.