haha sorry of course i need to post the recipe. Bought 96 ounces of canned Gooseberries and did a basic 4 gallon batch with D47. Feed it with stepped Fermaid K and Dap. Think it had like 11.5 lbs of honey was goin to take it dry and backsweeten it as needed. I just couldnt find a solid answer on what is in Gooseberries for acid.
That aside how do you do a Malolactic Fermentation?
You can just add the culture in at pitch so its happening alongside the main ferment. You can add it once the main ferment has finished.
The thing to avoid is sulphites. The levels have to be below 20ppm I believe. Which is why you dont stabilise without both sulphite and sorbate. The MLF bacteria will metabolise the sorbate causing geraniols but 1 campden tablet in a gallon provides about 50ppm of sulphites preventing this from happening.
So its usually done before you would stabilise.
it can happen naturally. If you already stabilised it would be a pain as it would be more complicated having to work out whether the sulphite level was low enough if you'd been trying to drive off the sulphites but then the sorbate would be exposed to being metabolised.
Which returns you to doing MLF before stabilising.......
But would it make a difference with gooseberry ? Well on checking around the link that skunkboy posted, while there doesn't seem so much data on percentages, there is malic in them.
So with that in mind, look up grapes.......and you'll likely note that while tartaric is the predominant acid in grapes, there is also some malic to and MLF is a wine making technique thats used successfully.
Ergo, you'd have to take a chance (MLF cultures are produced seasonally I understand so harder to get out of wine making season), tasting and then hitting the batch with the culture, letting it do its thing and then tasting again to see if there's any difference/improvement.
Personally, I'm thinking it'd just be easier to mask some of the acidity with extra sweetness. I doubt MLF is worth messing with except in a planned process sort of way. Doing this process to modify a flavour once its in there is likely to be much more tricky.
I believe the wine world tends to test for acid levels first i.e. before ferment and only MLF if the harvest seems to be high(er) acid and they want to reduce that in the finished wine.
Gooseberry is easy to reduce the acid, cook it first as it acts like apples and kiwi fruit when heated.
All you could do is to try it......