Learn French: L'acidité va en s'intensifiant si la cave est trop chaude. - The acidity keeps intensifying if the cellar is too warm.

This sentence uses the structure aller + en + present participle (the gérondif) to express a progressive, gradual change. Literally, it means the acidity 'goes on' intensifying. You can use this pattern to show that an action is increasing or happening little by little over time.

Why is there an s' inside en s'intensifiant?

The base verb here is s'intensifier (to intensify), which is a reflexive verb. When you put a reflexive verb into the gérondif form (en + present participle), you must keep the reflexive pronoun and make it agree with the subject. Since the subject is l'acidité, the pronoun is se, which shortens to s' before a vowel.

Is la cave a false friend here?

Yes! In French, la cave means a cellar or basement, and in the context of acidity and temperature, it usually refers to a wine cellar. If you want to talk about a natural stone cave, the French word is une grotte.

Why does this sentence use the present tense va instead of the future tense ira?

Using the present tense for both halves of a si (if) sentence states a general rule or a guaranteed scientific fact. While ira (will go) would be grammatically correct to express a future consequence, va works perfectly here because it describes a general truth about how cellars work.