Friday, March 27 2009

Coming Clean

Do you suppose he only drinks white wine?

I was doing some bottling yesterday, a two year-old rhubarb wine made from my garden produce, and a very interesting carboy of the original Montagnac Crushendo. I made it specifically to demonstrate racking of grapeskin products at one of our retailer conferences. I do believe it was back in the summer of 2006. It served its demonstration purposes, I racked it again, sulphited it and added 50 grams of toasted French oak cubes and left it until yesterday.

I am nothing if not patient. Looked at from another way, I'm pretty lazy about getting wine finished. But still, even for me this was going too far. The wine itself is fine--it comes off like a cross between a monstrous Rhone blend and a Ripasso from Italy: very strong, very pruney/red fruit/earthy and still righteously wrapped in a bobwire of tannins layered with smokey oak. Yum yum.

But the carboy was another matter. It seems to have picked up a bit of pigment in the intervening three years.

Believe it or don't, that carboy is actually empty. Just really, really stained.

(Note that this is the upstairs washroom at Winexpert. What do you use your office bathroom for?)

I've got access to all kinds of cleaning products, chlorine based oxidising santisers, caustic soda, perchloracetic acid (smokin'!), enzyme detergents . . . but we've taken on a new one to substitute for Diversol BX/A. Diversol is a good product: it's a pink powder made with chlorine bleach, some detergents and permanganate. I've used it successfully for years, but the price just shot up like crazy (worldwide bleach shortage, maybe?) so we're brought in a product that's been sold in the US and Eastern Canada for a while, but which we haven't seen here before: Aseptox. It's sold under the name One-Step in other places, but we like the coolness of 'Aspetox'. Sounds more butch and powerful, really.

First, I rinsed the carboy with cold and hot water in that order. Here's the result.

Dude, that looks like a write-off.Was that wine or motor oil?

So I put in about 8 litres of hot water which had thirty grams of Aseptox dissolved in it. It kind of poured down one side of the carboy, which created a very interesting effect.

Quite the glare in the exectuive washroom

That's no scrubbing, no soaking, just poured the stuff in. I shook it up and let it sit for five minutes. Then I rinsed it out and the result was pretty good.

The same carboy, five mintues later. It's like a magic trick!

Looks like I've found a pretty decent substitute for the old familiar pink powder. What will they think of next?

Posted by Tim AT 10:27PM 4 Comments Comments Post A Comment Post A Comment Email Email

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