review of my first wine

awhile back, i posted my first wine recipe for critique, the original recipe can be found here:

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due to delays in my personal life, i haven't had the chance to taste it until tonight. my initial thought was that it was too dry, but i know i had a decent amount of sugar for a very sweet wine. after thinking about it, i suspect that the problem was that i didn't include enough blueberries. i'm going to eventually try the recipe again a few times, adding about a pint of blueberries each time.

also, for those of you who have used teabags for tannin, how many bags would work for a single gallon batch?

and any other advice very highly welcome =)

Reply to
sdragon1984
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You really didn't have very much sugar at the start. 3lbs of honey in a gallon (not added to a gallon) will produce a sweet mead. I'm not sure how much sugar is in 3 pints of blueberries, but your recipe only included 2 cups of sugar and 0.25 cups of honey. This is roughly equivalent to a pound of honey, or maybe just a tad more. Would 3 pints of blueberries have as much sugar as 2 lbs of honey? I suspect not.

Greg

Reply to
greg

sdragon1984 wrote "i suspect that the problem was that i didn't include enough

You may know about Jack Keller's winemaking site. If not check out

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Jack has recipes for blueberry wine...this may save you lots of experiments.

Bill Frazier Olathe, Kansas USA

Reply to
William Frazier

actually, it was double that; the correction was in the second post.

would 9 cups of sugar work better? as for the berries, my main problem with measuring by the pound is that i don't have a scale at the moment. about how many pints should i use?

Reply to
sdragon1984

A starting gravity of 1.090 will finish as a dry wine with ~12% alcohol. To achieve this, you need to start with 2 pounds of sugar. I use 2.125 (2 and 1/8) as the conversion factor. That is, 2 pounds of sugar equals approximately 4.25 cups. As far as I can tell, pound for pound honey and sugar are roughly equivalent.

But if you doubled your original recipe, you would have used about this much sugar at the start. I would think that would produce a slightly sweet wine given that the sugar in the berries was in addition to this.

Jack Keller's mixed berry recipe calls for 4 lbs of berries and 2 lbs of sugar, but he also suggests that you "sweeten to taste" as a final step. Ultimately, I think that's the best advice. Bulk age for a few months, stabilize, then sweeten it as your taste buds dictate. After adding any sugar, give it another month to see if there are any signs of life before you bottle it.

If you start the batch with the gravity too high (too much sugar) you may have trouble getting the yeast started and in the end, you may decide that the resulting wine is too sweet. In that case, your only option may be to blend with a drier wine.

Regards,

Greg G.

Reply to
greg

Another wrinkle in this is yeast selection. Some yeasts give up at 12 to 14 percent alcohol, while others can reach 17 or 18 percent fairly predictably. If you used a champagne yeast, it may have simply consumed the extra sugar in your must, giving you a drier wine than you planned for.

This is another good reason to sweeten to taste after fermentation and bulk aging.

Greg G.

Reply to
greg

so I had the sugar right? I think i probably could have gotten away with another cup, but at least now I know that 4 1/2 cups of sugar is enough. I don't need to alter that anytime soon.

Yes, i really think there just wasn't enough blueberries. my next few batches of blueberry wine will take in more (again, no scale, but if i just adjust the blueberies one pint at a time...).

Reply to
sdragon1984

Just a heads up about Red Star Champagne Yeast; it's actually the opposite. It doesn't ferment to higher alcohol; it seems like a silly name for that yeast. I do agree there are yeasts out there that get to the alcohols Greg mentions though. I think Lalvins K1V 1116 gets up there. When I do sparklers I use one yeast for the initial fermentation then switch to another when I add my carbonating sugar. I usually use D47 at first and switch to EC1118. (I use Lalvin because it works for me, just a personal preference.)

Joe

Reply to
Joe Sallustio

Lalvin works for me also. My preferences are (in order) DV10, EC-1118, K1V-1118, and D47. D47 has a 14% ATL (alcohol toxicity level). The others have an 18% ATL. They all have a LFTB (lower fermentation temperature bound) of 50F (10C). EC-1118 has a LFTB of 45.6F (7C).

Yeast die due to age/starvation, alcohol toxicity, and heat which are inter-related. While cold fermentation (my preference) takes longer, it reduces the effect of heat on the yeast and increases the ATL. This results in a shorter age/starvation period which translates into less time between secondary storage and bottling and a lower probability of fermentation after bottling.

Dick

Reply to
Dick Adams

A strong suggestion. If you are really going to make several batchs of wine, get a hydrometer. It may seem scary to use such a tool but they are cheap (less than $10) and they are really VERY easy to use. They will turn the about of sugar used from a guess to a science. You really will get it right. If you get confused, any of us will help you out.

If you think your wine is too dry, add some sugar. I would rather make dry wine with the alcohol level I want and then sweeten it to taste. If you try to add enough sugar to make it sweet at the start the yeast will just eat more and make more alcohol. That is OK if all you want is alchohol, but

15-16% alcohol does not make good wine. It makes strong wine.

Ray

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Reply to
Ray Calvert

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