Reading Chromatography

This morning i removed the chromatography sheets from their jars and hung them outside the office to dry and resolve.


You can faintly see the wine spots have 'wicked' up the paper as it was carried up the paper by the solvent.


The order the organic acids resolve from bottom to top is tartaric, citric (if present), malic and then lactic. This finished sheet shows a large tartaric acid spot (yellow spots) and very faint if any malic and a small lactic acid spot. The small lactic spot could mean the wine had little malic to start with, which it did, and therefore there is little lactic produced. I like to see a better lactic spot ideally. The Wine Lab has a great pdf with instructions on the test and reading the results.

The drawback of the test is that it is qualitative, not quantitative and it can give somewhat questionable results. The test yesterday was far from conclusive, but does lead me to believe that the wines tested are vary close to being through, if not already finished with MLF.

The next step is to validate the chromatography with a enzymatic assay that give a quantitative amount of malic acid present. At that point i'd go ahead and add SO2.

I wish the test was a bit more conclusive, but such is life.