New Winemaker - Big Problems

I am responding on the NG. It is a good idea to do this since you will then get more information/help from different people. Also other will also learn from the ensuing posts. Which is how this NG works and why it is so successful.

We need some more information before anyone can give you real help.

1. What is the fruit of the "fresh berry" wine. What sort of recipe did you use?

1. What is the name of the wine kit i.e. both the name of the type of wine ( e.g. Merlot, Chardonnay ) and the name of the kit manufacturer( e.g. Winexpert, Spagnols)? Did you read and follow the instructions???

2. As much information about the fermentation period that you can give. a. Original SG b. Final SG c. Secondary fermentation -- did you rack off the fruit at all?

1. How old is the wine now. Has it only just finished fermenting? Was it degassed? Has it been aged at all? Has it been stabilised? Has it been bottled?

Try and give us at least the above information and anything else that will indicate the sort of background to the wines made and even of your own experience

Finally as a total guess -- I am suspecting that the wines are just much too young. Early tasting can be confusing to a beginner. The bouquet and taste of wine, the feel of it in the mouth, changes immensely with judicious "aging" New wine is inevitably coarser than the aged product.

That's enough from me now. Try and see this reply as a pointer towards help. If you respond I am sure that you will find the NG very useful

I would agree with everything Pinky said, it's probably just 'youngness' that you are tasting. Kit wines are usually not out of balance, if anything they tend to stay on the low side of things to make for earlier drinking. Young wine are usually not very pleasing, time makes a world of difference.

The more we know about your actual wines the easier it will be to answer. This is a very civil group and long posts with lots of detail are not an issue. This group has a wide range of participation so feel free to ask anything that comes up. It's not uncommon to get an answer in hours.

We can help you with the science of winemaking but over time you will see that it's more art than science. You need to balance the science by developing your personal tasting skills. It's actually a good thing that you realize you have a wine that is not exactly where you want it. The art part comes into play in predicting where it will go from here.

Wines develop in the bottle, you use the science to determine when you have the wine close enough to let it develop in peace and quiet.

Joe

P> I am responding on the NG. It is a good idea to do this since you will then

Okay we will start with the strawberry. It was strawberry wine. I handpicked the strawberries, crushed the berries by hand through cheesecloth to get the juice. I used a recipe I found on the Internet for Strawberry Wine. As for specifics, I can get those too if necessary.

The two wine kit wines that I made were as follows:

A.) Chablis Blush -- Vintner's Reserve -- Followed directions explicitly. This one tasted okay, but had a hint of a bitter flavor.

B.) Riesling -- Vintner's Reserve -- Followed directions explicitly This one taste like a 40 of Mickey's Malt Liquor that is flat. Definitely not the way a Riesling should taste. The taste is similar to the taste that I developed with the Chablis Blush, and now with the Strawberry. I know it must be an error in the process because I am consistenly developing similar tastes. It is very frustrating that they do not taste good, but I am not planning on giving up anytime soon.

I do not have these numbers readily available as we recently moved. The wine was not transported. I can tell you; however, that the specific gravity measurements were exactly where the kits said they should be when measured, when racked, and when bottled.

Yes I racked the fruit wine once, and it seemed to clear up very well after that. I only racked it one time though. Should I have done this more?

The Chablis has all been consumed, but it would be approximately one year and 4 months old now. The Riesling is approximately 8 months old now, and the Strawberry is approximately 4 months old now. I am not sure of the degassing process. Can you explain this to me in detail? The wine has been aged since bottling according to the numbers posed above. Yes it was stabilized, and yes it has been bottled.

It does not taste like wine. I cannot explain the taste well. Perhaps if you enter further directed questions I would be able to communicate more effectively. I entered it into a wine competition in the Kentucky State Fair. I knew it would not do well because it did not taste like it should, but I wanted to gain exposure to events such as that.

With the kit wines I used potassium metabisulphite as a sterilization agent....with the Strawberry wine I used Campden tablets. Could the levels of the sulphites in my wine be the problem? What would this cause?

I do not know how to tell whether or not a wine will go bad. Can you present this information? I was told strawberry wine will not be good after

John, I can't respond to the questions on your wine kits, but I have made strawberry wine a number of times. You said the wine was 4 months old, you racked it once, and you were not to happy with it. That may be a little young to expect much, especially if you only racked it once. Usually, I bottle my strawberry at about 7 months old and it has been racked 2-4 times depending on how well it clears. Young wines usually doesn't taste the best to begin with. It is kind of hard to describe the yeasty, alcohol kick which you can taste in young wines. If you rack the wine, and give the unfavorable stuff suspended in the wine to settle out, and then give the wine a chance to age, you'll find the wine will taste much different later on. The yeasty taste, and the alcohol taste will mellow out over time. Since you can't give us the % alcohol by volume, nor what your starting and ending SG was - its a bit hard for me suggest what else could be wrong, although there are other possibilities. May I suggest you hang in there and don't give up. Learning how to make wine you will like does take time, but it worth the effort. If I might suggest you take a look at Jack Keller's site homemade winemaking site

"John Fouts" wrote in message news:P3SLe.1012$ snipped-for-privacy@newssvr19.news.prodigy.com...

Wow. You guys really are fast with responses. The strawberry wine has already been bottled. So you would suggest letting it age for a few more months? I don't know if that will do any good, but I can try. It smells really good, but it tastes not that good. It has a bite almost like whisky it seems like. I will check out Jack's site and maybe try his recipe. Do you think it is better to continue making one wine and perfecting it? Or to try to make several different kinds of wine? Yes. I enjoy dry reds, but really I like a large spectrum of dry to semi-dry sometimes even some sweet wine is good.

Personally, due to the amountof time involved before one batch of wine is ready, and the fact I'm not sure which homemade wines I might like, I've followed the policy of trying a lot of different recipes, or variation s on same wine recipe, rather than makign one, waiting the 6 months - 2 years before it's ready, decide if I like what I did, and try again, etc. Personally, just can't see doing anything that time involved. :)

I just got started at the beginning of july, and currently am working on my

Of course, this answer also depends on how much you drink. I tend to drink between 10 and 30 bottles of wine a month, so I will keep this up for a while, and then take a break, and probably have a year's worth of wine to drink.

From my experience with making kit wines, whites, including Resling, should be ready to drink in 6 - 12 months. But maybe yours will take a bit longer. I have had good luck with Spagnoles Johannesberg Reisling and Gewertztraminer.

As far as the strawberry, I have never tasted a dry strawberry that I liked and I prefer dry wines. The best strawberry I ever had was one that was so sweet that I could not drink it. Could not think what to do with it. Then I got the idea - how do you eat sweet strawberries? Strawberries and cream of course. So I cut it with 50% cream and everyone loved it. Sugar will cover many faults. So if nothing else, you can sweeten it and use it as a desert wine.

Ray

This strawberry has an SG of .988. What does that mean?

John I have posted the reply below a couple of days ago but for some reason it hasnt appeared on the NG. It certainly left here. So here it is again and I hope it doesn't turn out to be a double post

"John, Well you certainly gave us a lot of info. Thanks.

I shall not make much comment on the Strawberry wine since Darlene has made a full reply. I make 5 gallons (Imp) of Strawberry wine every year to a recipe that I have been using for some 30 years! I use 20 pounds of strawberrys , freshly picked andhulled and freeze them since the freezing helps enormously with the juice extraction so there is no need to crush the fruit. I use about 5 kg of sugar.

When fermenting I also use a pectin enzyme which also helps in juice extraction as well. Primary fermentation on the fruit lasts for about a week until the SG has droppped to about 1.010. I then rack off and strain the pulp, letting it rest for about an hour to let heavier particles to settle out and then into a carboy for secondary fermentation to completion. Then racked off into a glass carboy and stabilised. I don't degas since it then will be left to age for about 6 to 9 months and I like my Strawberry rosé to have that tingle on the tongue. I will check the wine occasionally to see if excessive lees have settled out and if necessary I will rack again and readjust the SO2. I bottle at about 9 months and it is then ready for drinking a year after the first fermentation -- fersh strawberries with cram and a chilled glass of slightly "petilant" stawberry wine is one of my treats for guests in July and August.

The two VR kits! First of all let me say that I don't use Vintners Reserve kits. I made two kits several years ago when they were first introduced into UK ( a Chianti and a Gewurztraminer) Both were bulk aged for a year and I was most disappointed in both wines. The Chianti was absolutely nothing like chianti and was thin and lacking in mouth, taste and bouquet. The gewurzt was better but sadly quite unlike gewurztraminer. I have never made a VR kit since then!

Now this is purely a personal opinion. But in kit wines "you gets what you pays for". And in red kit wines especially, the less expensive ones of all brands fall very short of what I expect of red wine. I moved up very rapidly to the Winexpert Selection Series of wine for my reds ( the Luna Rossa is still one of the best of the original kits and I still make it - I consider it beats some of the more expensive kits !) Even so, in correspendence with Brew King and now Winexpert, I expressed my disatisfaction about well known shortcomings. When the Selection Estate series was introduced I tried them too but thought that the improvement was not worth the 50% price hike over the Selection series. January this year saw the first of the new Selection estate "Crushendo" kits in UK -- at nearly twice the price of the initial Selection Series I expect it to be a single try! BUT at the end of the secondary fermetation when I sampled to new wine before putting it down to bulk age, I was quite startled by its quality and for the first time a kit red wine had all the nuances I look for in red wine. I have just put my second Crushendo kit to bulk age but obviously I still haven't sampled the first kit again yet -- it has a few more months to go. I shall bottle in January and look forward to it immensely.

As I said at the beginning this is only a personal opinion but I just find that, with red wine kits especially, the "mid-range" and cheaper kits just do not fulfill my expectations. I have generally said on this NG -- "Always buy a kit at least one level more expensive than you think you want to".

In UK the VR kits are now about £42 and Selection - about £60, Selection estate £75 and my last "Crushendo" kit cost me £102 ----- all for 30 bottles

"> Definitely not the way a Riesling should taste. The taste is similar to the

It seems as though your kits wines were aged sufficiently but since your strawberry is also showing similar "off" flavours -- then perhaps we should look elsewhere! --- I might ask --

What do you use for your fermetation vessels? I use polyethelene ( food grade plastic buckets and fermenters for primary and secondary) I bulk age in 23 litre glass carboys ( and some 1 gal imp glass "demijohns")

Where does the fermentation take place?

I deduce that you do not "bulk age" and age in bottle. There are different opinions on this but if you have limited storage space which is not well temperature controlled then "Bulk" aging is far better

and oh -- what quantities are you making? -- I presume 6 gals US ( ie 5 gals imp or 23 litres)

By the way for my white wines I use a brand name available here in UK called "Beaverdale" which cost me about £35 -- some £7 cheaper than the VR kits. I bulk age my whites only for 6 months before bottling --- my favoutites being Muscadet and Sauvignon Blanc. White wine kits do not suffer from the well known "cooked" fruit taste of red wine kits and turn out to be truer varietal wines

Not very helpful so far but someone will come up with an idea or two!

Persevere with patience!"

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If I had to guess, I'd say your starting Brix was too high (too much sugar) and you ended up with a high alcohol strawberry wine. Try starting at 22° Brix next time. Strawberry is a delicate wine that would easily be overshadowed by big alcohol.

BTW, since you're taking your wines to dryness there is no need to add "stabilizer" (sorbate) to them. Personally, I find that sorbate adds an off/odd flavor to wines.

Tom S

That means that it fermented out fairly dry. In other words the yeast was strong enough to eat most all the sugar available. You need to know the starting SG to determine how much alcohol was actually produced. Depending on what the starting SG was, it could be anywhere from 16% down, or if you used a high tolerance yeast, anywhere from 19% down. But it is still young and as wines mature, the high octane taste will usually lessen or disappear. Give it up to a year to age. If it has not mellowed by then I would consider doing something. For fruit wines, I generally like to shoot for 11 to 12%.

Also, strawberries are notorious for fading. If you are aging it, be sure to keep it out of the light to protect it's beautiful color.

Ray

Same here Ray, I like to shoot for 11-12%. I will admit though, that during my second year (and into my 3rd yr) of winemaking, it took me some time to adjust my sugar amounts so I wouldn't go so high. I've been rather please with myself lately, that I am getting in that 11-12% range for all of my wines. Darlene

Thanks Pinky for all of the info.

I am aging in bottles...not bulk. I am using a food grade plastic primary fermenter, and a 6 gallon glass carboy. These should be fine shouldn't they?

Yes that is fine. Most of us bulk age in 5 to 6 gal. glass carboys. That is considered bulk. When we talk about aging in bottles, we mean that we have bottled it for consumption, usually standard 750 ml wine bottles or something of the sort.

Ray