Blending Wines

I try it for fun but follow a few time honored recopies. Look around and you'll find some traditional blend guidelines.

There is a book out called "Vino Italiano" that has some great examples of Super Tuscan reds.

Just won a gold medal with a Tignanello blend. Its a Super Tuscan with a majority being Sangiovese. A little Cab and a little Merlot. Its wonderful!

Dave Stacy

Just bottled a Cabernet Sauvignon / Zinfandel blend with excellent results. No science, no recipe just a simple 50/50 blend.

Steve

Joe,

You can find a wealth of information by searching the newsgroup archives.

One very good practice is to try several small samples of the wines to be blended using different ratios. Generally speaking it is usually disappointing when two very distinctive flavours are blended as the uniqueness of each is often lost. There are many exceptions however, such as my annual Bordeaux blend of barreled Cabernet Sauvignon and Merlot in a 60:40 ratio or a 50:50 blend. It is quite difficult to improve two faulty wines by blending other than the obvious complementary blending such as a higher acid wine with a lower acid wine. That being said, I had one of my carboys of Riesling during cold stabilization on my porch that was slightly over-oxidized as a result of a faulty lid that I did not discover for about 3 weeks. The wine did not have the strong off-taste of an over-oxidized wine but it had lost something. I blended it with a Gewurztraminer that I accidently over-sulfited a year ago and was surprised with the improvement over either of the unblended wines.

Good luck,

Glen Duff

Joe Ae wrote:

I only use blending for two purposes:

1. To correct acidity when a batch is too acidic
2. To get more uniform quality when I need larger batches for storage.

I do not recommend blend>

Steve

Looks like you started with 2 wines and ended up with 3 wines (cab sauv/zinfandel, cab sauv and zinfadel). Which one do you like best?

enjoy

Joe

Why all of them of course. Actually that's a good question. We blended half of our batch (130 gal) when we racked but we still have 30 gals of Zin and 30 gallons of Cab in plastic barrels waiting to go into an oak barrel. We will taste before we put the next batch into oak and make a decision then. We are aging in a 120 liter oak barrel for 3 months before bottling. This keeps wine in the barrel all year long and breaks the bottling into four sessions. I have returned to wine making after a 28 year hiatus and have been pleased with the results. We are using some of the same equipment - crusher and press - that my grandfather and uncle used some 60 to 70 years ago. I grew up drinking their wine, as kids we got to have a small glass whenever we visited for Sunday dinner. It has been very gratifying.

Steve

For me, blending is about adding complexity to already good wines - you can't fix faults, just dilute them a little.

My best blend to date (won a gold) is a Shiraz/Merlot/Cab blend, 85% Shiraz, 10% Merlot, 5% Cab.

I arrived at those numbers through tasting - I wanted to retain the character of the Shiraz, but I wanted to add more complex fruit - the Shiraz was one dimensional fruit wise, but was still good, I also wanted to extend the finish with some stronger tannins.

So I started with a 50/50 Shiraz/Merlot and worked my way down to 80/20 when i felt it was getting the right level of fruit from the Merlot without loosing the Shirazness of the wine. I wanted a little more tannin 'though, so I started blending in a little of a very tannic Cab. The end result was better than the sum of all three.

The keys to good blending IMHO are to a) Start with good wines b) Know what you want to achieve c) Try several ratios and refine what you want - a serological pipette is a great help here since it allows you to very accurately measure out a few mls of each wine - easier if you have several barrels full, but I only had

Alastair

The Mad Kiwi Winemaker (Remove nospam for e-mail)