hi this is how to test to see when your malolactic fermentation has completed that's important for a couple of reasons one is that you need to establish that it has finished before you can bottle your wine because in the spring if it hasn't finished then it will go into a spontaneous malolactic fermentation then if you bottle at that time then it'll pop your corpse out or worse explode your bottles so first of all whether it's a natural fermentation or if you have inoculated it to start this fermentation that the test for it is the same I inoculate for malolactic fermentation on all red wines that's where the malic acid is is converted to lactic acid and it is really also in a much smoother way okay that's another subject which I can I may or may not put in the notes I might just up put it in later but for right now how you actually do the test okay first of all you take a chromatography paper okay and you make marks on it so you make marks one inch from the bottom okay and then make a line all the way across so you have one my one inch line going all the way across the bottom okay then at each one inch mark use that 8 by 10 chromatography paper at the each one inch mark put a little arrow okay mm-hmm wear gloves when you're doing this because you are going to be working with some acids in chemicals of so I have my moths then you take these little capillary tubes there little capillary tubes and they're glass they're very fragile okay so you're supposed to put some of your standards in here of there's a range of ammount so what I've done is I've taken an empty capillary tube mmm here and you see these little black marks here I've made those marks at the range okay then I just I just take that to this bottle so that when I take my empty capillary tube and you dip it into the standards first is the two Tariq that's a Tariq acid I think that's this one okay what is it tartaric acid one is a malic acid one is a lactic acid you just put this little thing in there when you dip it in there some of the liquid starts to come up into the tube okay so each one of these you put this down on your paper and then when you do the paper then starts absorbing the liquid that's in the tube you're going to hold it up against here to see when you have the right amount in there it within that range if there's too much it's just kind of lay it against the the little paper towel you've put there and it'll absorb it really fast if you if you let out too much just put some more in again all right so you're going to do that with each one don't reuse any of these tubes once you put in your throat Tariq acid lay that aside take another tube and do the same thing hmm with your other assets that one put it on there throw it away put that one put it on there throw it away okay after you have done those then you're in you mark them to I put a tee at em NFL okay then and each barrel of line is numbered okay and if you're using a carboy make sure that you number your car boys put the number of the vessel that you're testing under here like if I put b1 b2 tank for what whichever vessel of line that I'm testing okay so if you're using a carboy you can just test directly just dip it down into your carboy I make blackberry wine and carboy still just put it on a clip like this dip it down to the neck it'll just start to fill up really quick and with your wine you're gonna see a lot easier than these liquid assets but up there get the right amount take it off the clip and then put it on barrel one or carboy one yeah if you're using tanks or barrels then you just use your wine thief and take just a little bit of wine tiny bit of wine out put it into a sample container a bunch of these little things like this you should mark your sample container to correspond with your barrel or tank and same thing just dip your stick into there it takes it up you hold it on there if it starts to give you a little trouble to get on there just rock it back and forth or go around like that and sometimes you can kind of click it and then it will often break through so I just try to be patient and just move it around a little bit okay so you get all those on there and then you give it about a half an hour to 45 minutes to dry then after that you take your paper and you roll it into a circle it's kind of thick paper and then you take your your stapler and then just staple oh and on your marks only use pencil pen will mess up your ear test okay so you staple each end like that okay you put your solvent or developer it's it goes by both names into your jar open and close the jar quickly because this stuff is pretty nasty so you put it you put it in there and make sure that it's coming up to about you know half an inch point about that much in your jar if you buy kids they send a kind of frosted plastic jar but I just replaced it with a glass jar now so I can see what's going on over time which will take anywhere from six to ten hours depending this solvent will start to raise up the paper and you can see it that now the solvent has it's kind of absorbed into the paper and is risen all the way to the top once it's done that and if you need to put it in overnight that's fine if it's in there a little bit too long in time that's okay all right so now you're all done and you go to take it out best thing to do with these staples because now this paper is wet but you need to unroll it for it to dry out so I just pull it I just pull it apart and it actually does less damage hold it where the staples are and then just just pull it let's just pull one side like that and then you have a lot less damage to your paper okay so then you take your paper and hang it up I have a metal rack I set it in but you can also just put plastic clips on it and hang it up somewhere but I normally do several sheets at one time because I have many vessels of wine to test so but if but let's just say that you're doing one clip it up hang it up somewhere outside because this I put I put these down in the winery if I put these sheets down in the winery to dry it will not only smell up the entire winery it will it will drift up and smell up the entire house and this stuff you really don't want to smell it for very long not only cuz it's kind of foul-smelling but it's it's not too good for you either alright so you have these let them dry outside if it's raining which happened to me and a couple of my tests it will mess up your paper but you'll still see the results okay so I I did like I said I have already done all my on my tests and this is the results that I got okay and let's see if I can get a good shot at this okay here is one of the test sheets this one shows here's the - Tariq and here's the Mallik I put - Tariq Malik and lactic so what I see from this one here and here's my standards this is showing me where this is showing me where the dots need to be okay so here everything has - Tariq acid in and it should be that way for a red wine or wine in general this is the malik and this is the standard but if i look across the different wine samples i have there's no there's no dots for the - Tariq okay I mean excuse me for the milk this top one is the lactic acid standard and as you can see there's very distinct dots on each one of these for that one so that means each one of these vessels has completed malolactic fermentation there is no more malic acid in here it's all been converted to lactic this will be safe to bottle right now my wine is in cold stabilization and soon as it's done is fine wrecked it can go and be bottled it's safe to be about okay another one here same thing this one's a little bit harder to see because it got a beating in the ring but but same thing I can see that there that the two tarik is there as it should be and there's no malik every one of them has you know this got worse over time but at the time i can see that all that had malik okay if your hat in a situation like this one here where the the line for malik is here and I see there's no malik but i can't really see the lactic acid i know it's there because it has one or the other okay so here is another test this one shows the standards and on this one the fermentation has not finished you can see that there are dots for the malik and for the lactic on all of these vessels so right now i could reenact you late and try to finish this but i'm not going to do that because it's more important um i can i can do that later but right now it's very cold in the winery and I need that period of time of cold stabilization that I can't reproduce but I can reintroduce malolactic fermentation and so I will do that in the spring on these on this one it's the same thing this is all of these have Malik in fact they're on it on these vessels there's more Malik than there is lactic so this is even the less has gotten less further along than the other one interesting one on this one too as you see over here that went for the tort Ark which you should see on every one is missing well these two vessels contain blackberry wine so that's not unusual there and there's there's different things that that I can do with that I'm really not you know really aged blackberry wine so it's not really an issue I can blend it with some other things to affect the taste or put citric acid or something like that but I would probably leave it alone but this this is more concerned with what you do about the mela mela lactic fermentation rather than the tartaric and mostly on red wine rather than fruit wines okay so that's everything and if you have any questions just put in the comments or PM me I guess and I will put some links as to good places for you to get these materials to begin with I guess it's probably good to buy a kid I only because it can end up to be less money because by the time there's some places it's a better place to buy your papers some places these are cheap or some places each one of these are cheaper but by the time you you pay the shipping charges to these different places you end up paying more so it's probably better in the first time to just to buy your kid and then after that you can go to the individual places to replace your your papers your standards and you're standards will never have to be replaced and they'll last forever but you will eventually run out of solvent because it comes up into your paper and you'll definitely run out of papers and your little capillaries okay