A Zin with no backbone

Greg,

High quality, red wine grapes have colorless juice. All of the red color is in the grape skins. Red wine is made by crushing the grapes and then fermenting the juice, pulp, skins and the seeds together for several days. During fermentation, the color is extracted from the skins. However, many other materials besides color are also extracted from the seeds and skins during red fermentations and these other materials are why red wines taste different than white wines.

Sterile red juice is made by crushing the grapes and then heating the juice, pulp, skins and the seeds together for a few minutes. The heat extracts much of the color, but little else (like tannin and some of the flavor producing materials) is extracted. Red concentrate is made by removing water from sterile red juice using a vacuum pan. So, sterile red juice and red concentrate contain little phenolic materials, and wines made from these materials are colored red but taste more like white wines. Your Zinfandel wine lacks phenolic materials, so additions of tannin, oak, vanillin, etc should help.

Good luck, Lum Del Mar, California, USA

Greg

I had a similar problem with a white Vineco kit wine that I bought. I can't remember the specific type of wine it was (Hock?) but it tasted like grapefruit juice. It wasn't bad tasting but wine just shouldn't taste like grapefruit juice, right? I complained to my local wine shop and they told me to bring in some and they would get Vineco to test it for me. May have been my fault or not, who knows? End result - I got a brand new kit.

Moral of the story is that it may be worth your while to talk to the company who made the kit.

I think in the interests of their company it was cheaper for the company to just replace the kit. It's cheap advertising for them. I have my doubts that they even tested it.

Frances