One of my winegrower that we sold grapes from last year is offering to press and pail juice for this next season. I have asked them several times now how they will without retaining the skins hold any color for the red wines, and I just don't get it. They claim that the juice is processed somehow so that the color will be there.
He sent me 2 pails of merlot(no skins)last year with their refrigerated shipment and yes the juice was very dark and the batch seem so far great?! Sure I'm out of the loop somehow. Anybody know what they are doing?
The two pails I received had a button on the pail for pressure expansion and they certainly had a positive pressure coming out of the pails.
Some red juices use a steam extraction method, which extracts the colour, but this juice is lacking in body, tannin and all the other goodness that comes out of the skins during fermentation.
If they can do that with juice, why don't they just crush and destem them and send that refrigerated - even better sulfated as well? A bit longer maceration wouldn't be all that bad would it?
I suppose one down side is that it takes more weight and volume to include the crushed skins than just the juice, but in that kind of shipment, the marginal freight cost wouldn't be too great I wouldn't think.
I have made Merlot from all the juice concentrate (6) that I have come across this last year. This is definitely one step better, but not like fresh made when it comes to the bouquet, it is not pronounced. Color never done much for me, but it is Disney strong. Color is vibrant.
I agree in pressing and keeping the skins with the lot that someone suggested. I have done 4 different blends this way from frozen and these wines have been quit well for me. But there still is the way these frozen skins look compare to fresh skins, also how the tasted. Freezing seem to have their own nuances.
As far as I am concerned the theory that hot pressed reds are inferior products lacking body and character is hogwash.
Most of my reds are from hot pressed juice and they are all you should expect from the area they are grown in, the hot central valley. Hot pressed reds make excellent table wine. Anyone who expects to make the equivalent of a $50 bottle from these grapes is just fooling himself anyway. There is absolutely nothing wrong with hot pressing reds. If I lived in Bordeaux or Napa Valley I would probably not do this, but I don't and neither do most winemakers.
We make excellent Syrah and Valdepena from hot pressed grape juice. The oldest we have to date is 6 years old and let me assure you they are pleasant wines. They are mature enough at 1.5 years and to date none of ours have fallen apart with age, (not that most get to sit on the shelf for years). They do not lack body, color or character. I have quite a bit of experience making good wine from red juice. The wines taste fine and lack nothing I am looking for. Regards, Joe
I have no experience with hot pressed red juice wines, so I fully accept your description of them. Perhaps I unfairly lumped them together with red concentrate wines, which I still maintain are inferior to whole grape wines. At least the dozen or so I tried over the years were.
Please remember that the sgbrix never said that the juice in question was hot pressed, but that the vendor gave some confusing explanation of how the juice was processed. That vagueness, together with the vibrant, Disneyesque color makes me wonder if the juice were simply cold pressed and color added. The taste seems OK to sgbrix, so perhaps the juice is everything it should be. The bright colors are still a puzzle, though. Do hot pressed reds usually show such vibrant colors ?
I'd like to try a hot pressed red. Are they available in small quantities or only in bulk? Maybe I can convince my local supplier to stock some. When I was there recently, he was as surprised as hell (and annoyed) to learn that the 5 gal pails of "juice" he'd gotten in were actually reconstituted from concentrate. He hadn't read the fine print.
Hi Mike, I use Regina, which is from Lamanuzzi and Pantaleo. They have a website and might be able to tell you where to get it in your area. It's readily available in the Northeast where we have a hard time growing good grapes. I don't know what SGBrix's producer is doing either, but the only way I know of to get red juice from red skinned grapes is natural fermentation or hot pressing.
I am not expecting to make fine wine from central valley fruit, just good table wine. I apolgize if it sounded overly harsh, but as in all things theres is a wide range of outcomes, we do not consider our wines to be low end and lifeless.
Homemade wines here in Pittsburgh vary quite a bit, I have tasted some gawd awful wines made from grapes, and some good ones too. I'm only saying I am limited by the quality level of the grape itself, and hot pressing if done corrctly does not seem to damage our end product. A well made wine from hot pressed juice tastes better than a poorly made wine from the same producer.
This year I bought some cab grapes to make alongside the juice and while it's too early to tell, I am doubtful this will end up better than the juice did. All that said, if I had access to high quality grapes I would not hot press them, I would want to control the extraction myself.
I am not a chemist and not an authority on hystamines but it does turn out there is some research that has been done on this subject. You might want to get access to Yair Margalits 'Concepts in Wine Chemistry', pages 342-343. To sum up, grapes do not contain hystamines and processing methods do not seem to affect hystamine production. Niether does fermentation. They seem to appear after malolactic fermentation, but not in all ML wines. They usually appear in higher levels in reds than whites, but that makes sense, more reds go through ML. He gives a few references for more info too. The theory is that another bacteria that likes the conditions present during ML might cause the hystamine production. The levels are pretty low, reds are 5.7, whites around 3.3 mg/l.
To actually answer your question, wines from the central valley are usually low in acid, so ML is not something you have to do. I rarely do it, so you may be able to drink my wines. If I were you I would make the wines on the higher side of the sulfite levels to stunt ML production.
If you bought Regina juice, it comes in at 100 ppm SO2. I would touch up the acid post ferementation, mine always seem to climb .5 to 1 g/l after ferrmentation. That way you son't overdo the acid and want to encourage ML. I would add 1/4 teaspoon pot meta per 5 gallon each rack, and probably rack only 3 times. That's more than normal, if you test sulfite just keep it at 40 PPM and I doubt it will go into ML spontaneously.
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