Chapter 15 is where winemaking gets quietly high-stakes. This episode focuses on what happens after fermentation, when the goal is no longer “making wine,” but making sure the wine will stay clear, stable, and true once it leaves the cellar.
We walk through clarification and stabilisation in a distinction-grade, exam-ready way: natural sedimentation and racking, centrifugation, fining trials and the risk of over-fining, and the major filtration pathways (depth, membrane, cross-flow) including what each is best suited for and why.
We then move into stability risks that can show up later in bottle: protein instability (and why bentonite matters), tartrate stability (cold stabilisation, contact process, electrodialysis, CMC, metatartaric acid), and microbiological stability (residual sugar risk, sterile filtration, sorbic acid, MLF restart, Brett and DMDC).
This is the “quiet engineering” of wine quality — the part that protects a wine’s style from being undone at the finish line.
