What Water To Use When Making A Homebrew Wine Kit

What water should you use when making a wine kit?  Is bottled mineral water best for making a wine kit? or is tap water the best for making a wine kit?

You may think using tap water or bottled mineral water is best when making a wine kit a home, but there are large differences in dissolved minerals in water from different sources.

Let us explain how to get the best water to use when making a wine kit and why it matters.

Most wine kits have had the grape juice concentrated, so you need to add water to the concentrate.  The manufacturers of the kits have already made some changes to the kits to account for you needing to add water back in, but we have such a wide range of mineral levels in our tap water here in the UK, the kits can't cover all eventualities, so we need to make a few adjustments when making the wine kits to get the best wine possible.

The grape vines have filtered the water when the grapes were growing and have used the minerals in the ground water to make the grapes juicy, fruity and flavoursome.

When the grapes are pressed, all that lovely grape juice is extracted.  When it is concentrated, only the excess water is removed.  This makes it a lot easier and more cost effective to transport.

But depending what water you use to rehydrate the concentrated grape juice back to its non concentrated level can have a huge effect on the finished wine.

In the concentrated grape juice are compounds and acids.  These can react with the compounds, alkalis and acids in the water you are going to add to the wine kit.  This can cause your finished wine to be very different to that which you would expect from that grape variety.

Using hard water, that's water with a lot of dissolved calcium carbonate (lime) can react with the acids in the grape juice and neutralise them.  This will result in a smooth wine, with very little acidity and this can make the wine seem lack lustre, and feel like its missing something.  It can make the finished wine seem less fruity, seem less zingy and seem less refreshing.

You'll know if you live in a hard water area by looking in your kettle.  When you boil your kettle, minerals dissolved in the water stick to the element and cause a yellow/white/grey fur to start building up.  This is the calcium.  

If you have ever descaled your kettle, you'll buy a descaler from the hardware store and if you read the ingredients, you'll usually find it's citric acid.  When you put that in your kettle, it fizzes as the acid and calcium carbonate react with each other.  They create CO2 and water.  The calcium carbonate disappears and the acid looses its acidity and basically turns to water.

What does that have to do with the wine.  Well the acids in the grape juice concentrate react with the calcium carbonate in the water you need to add and the hard water becomes soft, but more importantly the acids loose their acidity and turn to water.

Now if you live in a soft water area, you are so lucky. Lush water that lets shampoo bubble up into a luxurious velvet lather. No scale in your kettle, and more importantly, water that's great for making wine kits.  Soft water does not have the high levels of minerals in it, meaning there is no calcium to react with the acids in the grape juice.  This means it's great for making wine kits!

For the rest of us that live in a hard water area, there are a couple of options.  We can add more acids, or we can adjust the mineral profile of the water.

So lets look at the 3 main options...

Adding more acids to a wine kit

Using Acid Blend.  Knowing how much acid blend to add is not an exact science, as depending on the harness of your water and the amount of acid in the grape juice concentrate differs per kit. 

Acid Blend should be a mixture of Tartaric, Malic and Citric acids. The ideal ratio would be 80% Tartaric acid, 19% malic acid, 1% citric acid by weight  

So, you'll need an acid test kit.  Once you have added your water to your wine kit, put on the lid of the fermenter and leave for up to an hour for the acids and carbonates to react with each other.  Then use the acid test kit to work out the pH of your juice. 

Ideally, red wines should be around 3.4 - 3.7pH. White wines should be around 3.2 - 3.5pH.

To increase acidity by 0.1pH, add 0.5 gram of acid blend per 1 litre of juice.  So for a 23 litre batch, adding 11.5grams will increase the whole batch by 0.1pH.

Be cautious adding acids, always up the pH by 0.1pH point at a time and retest the pH until you reach the desired level.

You may have to make a few brews to get to the desired finished acidity level, so make notes of how much you used and your pH readings.

The wine kit manufacturers have already adjusted the wine kits for the correct acidity levels if you are rehydrating the kit with pure water with no minerals.  So if you can get pure water, then use this.

Adjusting your Water

Knowing how much calcium in your water is a good place to start.  You can contact your local water company and they can give you the details of the minerals in your water.  Or you can buy a water hardness tester kit. These are relatively cheap and you can use them over and over again as sometimes the source of water in your pipes can be different. It may come from a different reservoir, or a river, or an underground aquafer depending on the time of year, weather conditions, etc, etc.

If you know the harness of your water, then you can adjust your water before you add it to your wine kit.  Only adjust the water you are adding to the kit before you add the water.

Hard water can easily have and alkalinity of 300mg/litre of calcium carbonate dissolved in the water.  To reduce this down to a suitable level of around 50 mg/litre will mean adding acid - AMS.

0.35ml of AMS will reduce 1 litre of water by 64mg of alkalinity.  So you will now need to calculate the amount of AMS needed.  

First work out the harness of your water.  Then minus 50. Divide this by 64. Times this by 0.35.  This is how many ml of AMS you need to add to each litre of water.

For example.  Our water is 300mg Alkalinity. Minus 50 = 250mg.  250/64 = 3.9.  3.9 x 0.35 = 1.36ml AMS per litre of water.

Then times this number by the amount of extra water needed for your kit.

If your grape concentrate is 10 litres, you'll need to add 13 litres of water.  Times the amount of AMS per litre by the amount of extra water.

So in our example, we need to add just 13.5ml of AMS to our 13 litres of really hard water to get it to the right pH level to add to the wine kit.

AMS is very strong acid and is very dangerous, so skin protection and eye protection must be worn.

AMS will also increase the sulphite & chlorite levels, so just be aware of this. Though even with our hard water here with an alkalinity of 400mg, the amount of AMS needed doesn’t cause the levels to exceed allowable levels.  

The 3rd Option

You can filter your water.   You can get pretty cheap filter jugs that run the water through beads that capture the minerals.  These work very well and a lot of people only drink filtered water, so replacement filters are very easy to find.  They don't get rid of all the minerals, but will help improve your water if you don't fancy using either of the above options.

You can now buy an osmosis filter and filter your water.  These can be plumbed into your mains water supply and you can have a filtered water tap by your sink.  These are great (although a little expensive) and they mean you get pure water as they trap everything.  You can also buy filtered water that has had all the impurities removed.

Now all you have to do is add your adjusted water to your wine kit and brew it up as per the instructions.  You will now find your wines are AMAZING.  It may seem like a small thing to do, but when your water makes up 50-75% of the water in the wine, it is a huge ingredient and it can and does have a huge effect on the finished wine.

Trust me, it's worth a few £'s for the test kits and they'll last you for many kits!

Chlorine

As a final thought, people always ask about how chlorine will affect the wine.  Well, in the wine kits (and on the grapes themselves) there are sulphites.  These help protect the grapes and grape juice from infection and also help prevent the grape juice oxidising.  What do sulphites have to do with chlorine, well, chlorine and sulphites react and they create a salt - table salt. So little salt that it is imperceptible, but it means that the sulphites are reduced and the chlorine is neutralised.

Hopefully, from our short article, you should now be able to adjust your water to help you make an amazing tasting wine.  As always, if you need any help with this subject, then just get in touch.

Cheers and happy brewing.

Davin