Waiting for MLF
Waiting for MLF
Every year I go through this, why can't I just chill?
Nothing happens. Nobody comes, nobody goes. It's awful. ― Samuel Beckett, Waiting for Godot
An abashment of acronyms
Around this same time last year, I wrote a very detailed explanation of MLF and how to test for it with paper chromatography.
Say, what…?
MLF—malolactic fermentation—of interest to absolutely no one except winemakers, food scientists, and perhaps a few chemistry geeks. Essentially, it’s wine’s “secondary fermentation” where bacteria, not yeasts, effectively take the edge off a wine's acidity by converting the sharper malic acid into the softer lactic acid, smoothing out harshness and adding appealing depth and complexity.
This is generally a very good thing in most red wines. Not so much with whites. With one notable exception—Chardonnay. MLF is responsible for the formation of a compound known as diacetyl. And diacettyl has a buttery taste, like what you get with movie theater popcorn (in fact it’s actually used in the faux “butter” they pump all over movie theater popcorn!). With Chardonnay, it also adds a lush creaminess to the mouthfeel, particularly if the wine has been aged sur lie in oak. The end result is a classic California Chardonnay.
I’ll come back to Chardonnay in a sec, but first I want to finish my rant on MLF.
But hold on. My autocorrect keeps changing that to MILF. I don’t get it. What does that mean? Man, I Love Fishing? I do, but I’m trying to talk about MLF here, not angling. Am I missing something? For another perspective on the MILF/MLF confusion watch the video below. I’ve cued it up to the right place so you only need to watch about 40 seconds for total enlightenment.
Thank you, Jennifer. Now let’s wrap this up.
Over the past few years, I’ve often thought of the obscure phrase. “Waiting for Godot.” When I was young, different adults in my orbit would use that expression around me when I was dallying at some task, or was late to arrive somewhere, or completely forgot to show up. It wasn’t until years later in a college literature class that I suddenly discovered its meaning. And now, that’s how I sometimes feel about the onset of MLF in my wines. And, I guess, often about fishing. Definitely about MILF.
When I first started winemaking, I would inoculate my wines for MLF and that pretty much insured that it would happen shortly thereafter. And there’s a whole world of discussion out there about “co-inoculating” MLF with your alcoholic fermentation, or right near the end of it, or right after it finishes, with various impacts on the wine—both good and bad—depending on when you chose to do it.
But let’s leave that to the MLF-obsessed (MILF-obsessed?). My wine guru friend, Ken Wornick, would just show up for a late harvest-season round of golf all casual and relaxed, “Yeah, all my wines are through MLF. Put ‘em all to bed yesterday.” And he never inoculated anything. Never does. Just lets nature do her thing.
I thought that was so cool, still do. So, like I often do, I emulated Ken, with MLF, and had great success every year. The bacteria responsible for MLF, Oenococcus oeni, lives in the winery—just like feral yeast—and particularly in barrels that have been previously used. All you have to do is have faith and it’ll happen.
Of course, it can still be like watching paint dry, or grass grow, or, er… waiting for Godot. It can feel like it’s never going to happen. And then suddenly, it does.
But how do you know it happened? Well, if you’re really good, you can taste the change in your wine. Or if your palate isn’t that fine-tuned yet, you can resort to some high school chemistry and chart its development using paper chromatography. [Again, read all about it here.]
Even though I began “reaching dryness” (all the sugar in the wine converted to alcohol) with my alcoholic fermentations as early as the first week of October, it wasn’t until December that I started to see my wines completing MLF. I’m guessing it’ll be January before most of them are finished. And that is good news, as I’m planning on racking all of my 2022 vintage wines on January 3rd.
Except for an initial low dose of 25 ppm of SO2 (sulfur dioxide) prior to alcoholic fermentation, just to ward off any microbial bad guys, I haven’t added any sulfur to our wines up to this point, relying instead on good winery and barrel room practices, and the natural protective layer of CO2 from first and secondary fermentations. Now, when I rack in January, I’ll add enough potassium metabisulphite to get them all up to .5 ppm molecular SO2 to make them stable. Then, as Ken would say, I’ll put ‘em all to bed for the winter.
With one exception. Yep, that rascally Chardonnay.
Oddly, as of the 15th of this month there has been only a hint of MLF activity with our Chardonnay (check the paper chromatography), even though it was the first to finish alcoholic fermentation way back on September 19th. And, it’s even been in once-used French oak barrels the whole time.
For whatever reason, it’s been poking along now for over three months, pretty much avoiding MLF. And it tastes great—fresh, crisp, very fruit forward with bright acidity! Certainly not the big, oaky, buttery, creamy Chardonnay that was the rage in the ‘80s and ‘90s, and still seems to be the afternoon white wine of choice for every desperate housewife caricature on every TV movie, sitcom and reality show out there.
When my Tiny Vineyards Wine Company partner, Bruce Flynn, and I decided to make a Chardonnay as part of our inaugural 2021 vintage we were decidedly torn between being card carrying members of the ABC Club (Anything But Chardonnay—yeah, it’s a real thing) and making that classic butter bomb. We finally opted for the latter just to prove we could make it, before exploring our future options with progressive, Chablis-style, sans-oak, sans-MLF, licking-wet-stones-minerality revelations.
But I can’t make a buttery Chardonnay if the wine doesn’t go through MLF, and I’m not sure I even want to now given how delicious our three-month-old wild child has become. But I’ll have to do something. I can’t just leave the wine unprotected too much longer.
And so I did what I hope we never become too complacent or risk-averse to try.
I showed up at Magnolia this week with a 2.5-gram packet of Enoferm Alpha dry malolactic bacteria (the most diacetyl-producing bacteria on the market) and a 60-gram packet of Opti’Malo Plus dry nutrient. I dissolved the nutrient into just enough water to dissolve it, and I hydrated the bacteria in 10 times its weight of 68-degree water for 10 minutes, and then I poured them both into…
…one of our two barrels of Chardonnay. In the other barrel I stirred in enough potassium metabisulphite to achieve 50 ppm SO2—the prescribed dosage used by 21st century Chardonnay makers to halt MLF and avoid the buttery taste. I might even rack this wine into a steel barrel to lessen the oak impact.
So now we’ll know—in about three months when we plan to bottle our Chardonnay—which style we want to make going forward. Of course, we might end up making both, or heck, maybe we’ll blend the two together and create something better. Hard to say. It’s up to the wine now, and its inherent magic.
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