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1st time grape wine using Jack's basic wine procedures

So this is actually my 2nd wine. Cherry being my first.

I went out at night and picked 3 (20) liter buckets of Dornfelder grapes. The next morning I separated the grapes from the vine by hand.

The 3 buckets yielded 2 full buckets of most. I added 1/4 teaspoon of meta per bucket and let it sit for 18 hours. During this 18 hour period, I took a cup of this juice and mixed it with a cup of water and pitched my monatracht (sp?) yeast into a starter. After 18 hours I split this yeast between the buckets. It fermented for 5 days. A couple times a day, I pushed the cap back down into the must. Everything smelt and looked great until.........day 4. That's when the fruit flies came for a visit! Actually I was pretty shocked that it took them that long to come. I expected them on the 1st day.

After 5 days, (last night) I poured the grapes, juice, and pits through a nylon strainer bag and pressed out the juice with my bare hands. I then racked it into a 25 liter glass balloon, a 4 liter, glass ballon, a 1 liter beer bottle and a 1/2 liter beer bottle. The smaller bottles will be to top off the bigger ones later down the road. After all that, I still had to dump 8 liters of juice, as I had no place to store it.

The OG was 1.093 the gravity last night was 1.006. I took a taste of the 1.006 gravity sample and it was......the tartest thing I ever tasted! I assume the acid must be very high. Is this normal! Will it correct itself over time or am I suppose to do something? Anyone see anything wrong with my procedures? I followed a generic grape wine recipie from Jack's site.

Reply to
Phil
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Phil,

The method is sound, so -- I'm just guessing, but -- it appears the grapes may not have been fully ripe. In any case, they had far more acid than is normal, although I am not personally familiar with the Dornfelder variety.

Go ahead and finish the wine. There are two things you can do and you might want to do them both (based on your account, I probably would).

The first is inoculate with an ML culture and allow malolactic fermentation to run its course. This will smooth out the wine some by reducing the amount of tart malic acid.

Then rack and top up and when the wine is clear and racked off the last sediment, move it into a cooler (refrigerator). Depending on the temperature of the cooler, it may need to be in there from 3 weeks to

2 months. But I am certain you will see a precipitation of potassium tartrate crystals. Rack the wine off the crystals and bottle it if acceptable. If still too tart, then you have a couple of choices to make. You can either sweeten the wine to mask the tartness or chemically neutralize some of the remaining acid and age the wine a while (always age after chemical intervention for high acidity). A third option is to age it a couple of years.

Good luck and let us know how it turns out.

Jack Keller, The Winemaking Home Page

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Reply to
Jack Keller

Hi Jack You mentioned in your note to let the over acid wine age a couple of years. Will this actually reduce the acid? thanks Sarge

Reply to
Sarge

Sarge, according to Jackisch, Margalit, Ough, and the other wine chemists out there, the acid is not actually *reduced* in quantitative terms, but changed chemically and softened. I am not a chemist, but I am a believer that time cures many harsh wines. Lum can probably explain it. I would have to look it up and then paraphrase the answer.

Jack Keller, the Winemaking Home Page

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Reply to
Jack Keller

That happens in general, so it's not just an issue for harsh wines. In particular, I had several white (grape) wines that were sweetened to what I thought was perfect balance at the time. Half a year after, all of them tasted too sweet because the acid softened up. I haven't got to try this yet, but next time I'm sweetening, I'll aim to be slightly off balance on the crisp side.

Reply to
pp

I'm just gonna set this one aside till X-mas 2005. I didn't know what a malto fermentation was so I googled this group and found out. Seems it would be a bit too late to order, and inoculate this wine with it as the og was already too low to have any effect.

As for the grapes being picked too early, they were not. It was already Oct. 21st and that's pretty late to be picking grapes in Germany. The vinter harvested the field on Oct. 22nd. The grapes tasted excellent and ripe at picking.

I wonder what the small wineries in my town do to reduce this acid? In Germany I don't think they are allowed to add certain chemicals. Could the yeast type or fermentation temp have anything to do with it?

Reply to
Phil

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