Q: I accidentally made my sulfite solution at 20% (I forgot to top up with cool water when I made the solution) and added double the recommended amount of it to my wine. Is the wine still drinkable?
— Cavan Baillie • Renfrew, Ontario

A:
Since I don’t know what your “recommended” number was it’s impossible for me to know what a double addition is in this case. Therefore, you should definitely exercise caution before drinking and if your addition was greater than 50 ppm, I would send a sample out for a lab to check it. The legal limit for Free SO₂ on wines in the US is 350 mg/L so if it’s over this level, the government would say a wine is unsaleable.

But what if your levels aren’t nearly that high and you want a ballpark answer about the drinkability of the wine? It’s really a matter of your own taste balanced against the level of the addition you made.  If you were doing your monthly SO₂ addition with topping, and the wine already had SO₂ in it, you were probably trying to add around 10–20 ppm total SO₂. If you were to add double that amount, it’s not the end of the world.

If you added twice the SO₂ (say, you added 40 ppm total), you probably are OK to drink the wine if you give the wine a little time to absorb that level of SO₂. SO₂ binds up with sugars, aldehydes and other compounds and I find the “dirtier” (more cloudy, unsettled and turbid) the wine, often the more of the SO₂ will bind up and go to Total SO₂. The Free SO₂ is what you would smell or taste.  If your wine is young (especially if it was a highly-colored varietal), chances are good that it will “bounce back” from such a big addition quickly, and would be drinkable within a week or two. If your wine was very clean or almost bottle-ready, that much Free SO₂ will generally take longer to bind up so I would give it more time before taking a sip, maybe three or four weeks before checking in.