Wine Analysis FAQs

Check out our handy-dandy distilled ABV infographic to see if we recommend distillation for your type of sample. If you still aren’t sure, we would be happy to help guide your decisions – just ask!

We use a threshold of 1.0 g/L Glucose+Fructose. Leaving residual sugar in your wine is leaving food for yeast and bacteria to ferment. It is important to be cautious and extra sanitary with off-dry, semi-sweet, and sweet products to prevent microbial spoilage.

We use a threshold of 0.05 g/L. Anything greater than that could be a food source for off-flavor producing microbes – and we don’t want that.

Cold stability testing is a wine analysis that evaluates whether tartrate crystals (“wine diamonds”) are likely to form in bottle.

They’re harmless – but consumers don’t always know that and think they are glass.

Most often conducted on whites and roses, but occasionally we test reds as well.

If a wine is not cold stable, it can easily be fixed by chilling, seeding (adding a small amount of tartrate to start the precipitation reaction), and/or using a commercial product like Laffort Celstab or Enartis Zenith Uno. We keep these products stocked so can also test them on your sample to confirm the effectiveness on your wine.

Heat stability testing determines whether your wine is protein stable. If unstable proteins are present, haze can develop in bottle either with aging or with elevated temperature exposure (like a warehouse or hot car).

We measure turbidity (ΔNTU) before and after heating to see if proteins are likely to cause a problem. If instability is detected, we can use the client’s bentonite to determine a personalized bentonite addition rate. Too much bentonite strips out mouthfeel, flavor, and aroma. Not enough and haze formation is likely to occur.

Short answer: depends on what you want to know.

Protein stability testing tells you if your wine is unstable.
A bentonite trial includes a protein stability test and helps determine how much bentonite is needed to fix it.

Doing both protects wine quality and helps avoid unnecessary stripping. If you suspect a bentonite trial may be needed, we will start with an initial stability test to determine the trial rates to be used. If, with that initial, we find that the wine is stable, we will only charge for a stability test and not a full bentonite trial!

Stability testing should be completed on the final blend – that means with all additives, like sugar. Adding “just a keg” or “just a splash” of another wine or product can affect the final stability.

Order of operation we recommend:

• conduct a bentonite trial
• bentonite your tank, settle, rack
• retest the heat stability to confirm the treatment was successful
• test the cold stability
• cold stabilize and retest to confirm the treatment was successful OR use a CMC product (or similar)

This happens more often than people expect.

CMC is used for tartrate stabilization, but if a wine is not fully protein stable beforehand, CMC can interact with residual proteins and increase turbidity.

If you’re seeing haze after CMC or sterile filtration, send us the details — we’ll help troubleshoot.

Unless you have added protein, sodium, cholesterol, etc. via adjunct or processing products – they aren’t in your wine! The FDA allows you to assume a concentration of zero if a nutrient is not present within a “recipe”.

If you have used a product that adds an FDA required nutrient, and it isn’t a part of our panel, then we should talk before conducting the analyses.