pH & SO2

(Left to Right - Anton, Michael, Paolo, Marty (kneeling) & Mike) Yesterday I picked up the pH test strips from Nina. Her son is graduating High School and we spent some time feeling older. Test strips are not as accurate as a pH meter, but we just don't have the quantity of wine going at the moment to justify a pH meter. We got these strips to assist in the determination of how much SO2 to add to the wine. This is an alien process to us, always having made a purer wine with no artificial additions, but now we have those barrels, we have to protect against air, and barrels are primarily designed to air your wine, albeit in a controlled manner.
What protects the wine is the level of free sulfites in it. These occur naturally. Without adding anything we have 45ppm in the BDX and 40ppm in the SanG. The effectiveness of sulfite against oxidation decreases as the pH increases, so you need to compensate for the pH level when calulating the sufite required to provide adequate protection.
We tested the BDX. Not unusually, it returned a pH of between 4.0 and 4.2, call it 4.1. This seems right for this type of wine. Its free SO2 is 45ppm. Now this is where the discomfort comes in... The recommended SO2 for a wine with pH of 4.1 is 110ppm, and we have 45ppm. This means that we have to introduce 0.73 ounces of SO2 to the barrel (which is about 57gallons). This of course blows the "organic" standard of 50ppm. It will be the first time any of our wine has been subjected to artificial interference of any kind and it just doesn't feel right, even though this is what the industry does and the science supports.
So, do we SO2 as recommended, or wing it and just keep SO2 around 50ppm?
With the SanG, we're not expecting that Quandry. I expect it to be of a lower pH and therefore its free SO2 of 45ppm will very likely be more than sufficient.