Friday, December 14 2007

Water, Water

Water, water, everywhere,
And all the boards did shrink;
Water, water, everywhere,
Nor any drop to drink.

The Rime of the Ancyent Marinere
Samuel Taylor Coleridge, 1798

Sam Coleridge's story of toodling around Antarctica on a birding expedition is open to many interpretations (my own is that it's an examination of original sin and regret, but English Lit. was thirty years ago) but everyone remembers the 'water, water' line. And questions about water often come up in winemaking discussions.

Wine kits require the addition of some water, to reconstitute the kits to their full 23-litre (6-US gallon) size. Since the retail water industry has made a big deal about the quality of water in North America, many people assume they need some kind of specially treated water to add to their kits. Actually, unless your water is phenomenally awful, with permanent hardness, high iron levels, or awful smells and flavours (such that nobody drinks it), then it's fine for winemaking.

I don't personally use bottled water. My reasons are several:

I hate paying for something that's readily available for free
Plastic water bottles are made from oil. These days, oil is a Big Deal.
Nobody can prove bottled water is better than tap

In a blind tasting, Decanter Magazine judged 24 different waters, and the majority of tasters preferred tap water. The panel was made up of sommeliers and Masters of Wine, and was done blind. It's pretty telling that local tapwater placed third, while $100/litre H2O in a crystal-studded bottle placed nearly last.

Municipal water treatment is a fascinating topic. The process for treating tapwater usually involves pumping it into storage tanks, screening out leaves and sticks, adjusting the pH (if it's too acidic, it can leach metal from pipes) flocculation (actually a fining process, just like that which wine goes through), sedimentation (where the fined goo falls out of suspension), filtration and finally disinfection. All but the last step is pretty straightforward--they're all processes to ensure the water is clean and clear.

Disinfecton is what throws people. It's natural to assume that because you can smell chlorine or chloramines in your water supply (the additive is essentially the same thing as household bleach) that it's going to affect the wine. What actually happens is this: all of the grape juices used in winemaking, be they Winexpert kits or even fresh grapes, contain sulphite compounds--they're present on all grapes. When added to a solution containing chloride ions (the form the chlorine takes in water) sulphites bind to them nearly instantly, forming stable chloride salts like potassium chloride or sodium chloride--table salt. If you bind out 100% of the chlorine in municipal tapwater with sulphite, you'll wind up with about two grains of table salt per 23 litre batch. That teensy amount won't have much effect, especially when it's mixed into a wine with a brix of 25 and a whole lot of acid, sugars, and solid material.

But this only covers properly treated water. If you're on a well, you need a laboratory assessment of the water to make sure it's not contaminated with minerals like iron (the enemy of winemaking) or high in bacteria. Also, if you're from somewhere like my ancestral stomping grounds, your water will be hard enough to break rocks and smell like it's been drank once already--that's a great indication that you might want to choose bottled or filtered water. To learn more about it, you can check with Health Canada, or the NRDC.

Posted by Tim AT 6:59PM

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