Hazy Shade of Vintner

As my Chardonnay completes its malolactic fermentation, I’m struggling with what to do about the cloudiness of the wine.  Generally speaking, hazy wines can be either filtered (which is not unlike straining your cooked pasta but with much, much smaller holes) or fined (which involves putting some ingredient into your wine which will bond with the floating particles and pull them to the bottom.)  In my case, filtering is not on the table because I don’t have the right equipment, but fining agents only cost a couple bucks. 

Fining - Putting junk in your wine so that it will pull out the other junk.

The question therefore becomes if and when.  Of course, I’ve never made a white wine before, and have no one I can ask.  In typical fashion, the books don’t help at all.  Some say to fine all whites during fermentation, some say to do it at the first racking, and some say to wait until the very end because you probably won’t need to do it at all.  As a general rule, I’d rather not add anything to the wine, but the longer I wait to see if it clears up on its own, the more risk I run that a late addition could alter the wine’s character without leaving it much time to recover.  Here’s an example why trying to teach yourself a skill may not be all that efficient, particularly when at best you get two tries at it a year.  For the moment, I’ve decided not to do anything.  If I serve you a cloudy homemade wine in the future, however, I’d appreciate it if you’d keep your snickering to a minimum.