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Topic: Sugar Content in Wine  (Read 1950 times)

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Offline Ntripleb

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Sugar Content in Wine
« on: June 05, 2011, 03:17:04 AM »
So im doing an experiment which i got 2 different aged wines, but identical brand etc. and stored that at different temperatures,
1 degree
22 degree
36 degree
and discussing alcohol content, sugar and acidity.
I found that heated had least amount of sugar, and cooling had most
i cant find anywhere that suggests why... but im guessing because they were placed in unsealed beakers, oxidation occurred (obviously) and mainly evaporation reduced the amount of sugar.
anything else possible?
edit: sugars to heavy to evaportate due to 6 carbon atoms..?
« Last Edit: June 05, 2011, 03:36:23 AM by Ntripleb »

Offline Twigg

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Re: Sugar Content in Wine
« Reply #1 on: June 05, 2011, 08:33:53 PM »
Well, just to get this possibility out the way: If you're using a conductivity meter to measure total dissolved solids (TDS), then it could be instrumental error. (But I'm guessing you used one of those spectrometers designed for wine analysis specifically.)

Evaporation isn't likely as you said because of sugar's high molar mass. I'd bet that the sugar is being consumed in aerobic respiration at a faster rate with higher temperature. Try correlating the trend in acidity with the trend in sugar concentration. That should tell you whether oxidation is the main process consuming sugar.

It's possible you won't see a trend in acidity because of the already low pH and buffering effects in wine due to carboxylic acids in wine. I don't really know if that will affect the results or not, but if it doesn't then try incorporating aqueous CO2 measurements into your experiment.

Hope that helps.

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