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Selection Estate Series A new Wine with Crushed grape skins!

I have just been informed by Mr Jeff Anderson, Export Market Manager with Winexpert, that a new wine kit in this series is just about to be launched in UK. It is called Selection Estate Crushendo and contains crushed grape skins. It is just about to be shipped in its container to the UK distributor and will obviously be in very limited supply over here in UK initially. I have already been in contact with the UK distributor and have ordered one! I cannot find any information about it on the Winexpert website.

I got this information as a result of correspondence about the Selection red wine kits in general and was most grateful for the way my enquiries and comments were received by Winexpert (including adverse comments by me as well).

I was wondering if anyone, over the other side of the pond, has yet used this new kit and what comments might be available. After the mails from Mr Jeff Anderson it is my intention to follow the instructions with the new kit implicitly down to the last "T" ( except I will not use any sorbate included) and see how the wine resolves itself.

An interesting comment about my Bulk aged Selection Estate Lodi Old Vines Zinfandel which I started in September 2003 and am just about to bottle. The extract below is from his e-mail

"You said the Selection Old Vine Zinfandel is ready for bottling, and I noticed it has bulk aged for some time and you have not filtered it. If I can make some suggestions 1. bulk aging there really is no advantage here, you can leave it for 30-45 days but I recommend you bottle soon after it has finished the process, from our experience it will age faster in the bottle.

  1. I recommend you filter unless you are looking for the taste of lees, this can also give you that blandness, with this kit the there was a lot of Oak which should give you a little more astringency. Also filtering is like polishing your car, when you wash it looks good as when you fine the wine it look clean and clear, Now when you polish your car it looks fantastic and you like to drive around in it to show everyone, that is what filtering does for the wine it polishes it and you want to share it with friends as well it removes that yeast flavour and impurities"

I confess that I am still most reluctant to filter my wines but I shall think about it and perhaps try it with this new wine if it is recommended.

Reply to
pinky
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Trevor:

The best place to go for info on this is the Winepress forum - there have been quite a lot of excited discussion about this new kit. Plus the "author" of the Winexpert kits, Tim Vandergrift, posts there regularly:

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The kit was just released, so I doubt you'll get decent data at this point, but I'm pretty sure somebody from that forum is fermenting it already.

As for Jeff's comments, I don't normally filter my wines, but 2 white kits I made this year ended up with a very strong and to my taste unpleasant, almost salty, yeast taste. I've filtered one of them as a last resort and the bad taste seemed pretty much gone after. I'm still waiting to pass the judgment after I open a bottle when the bottling shock is over, but it seemed to work well. I've never had this before with juice or grape wines, so it must be something in the kit processing that causes this, although it didn't happen for all the kits I made that time.

Also, after tinkering with the process and getting less than satisfactory results, I've also decided that the next kit I make will be done exactly per instructions to see if it's my modifications that are the culprit and not the kits themselves.

Pp

Reply to
pp

Pp Many thanks for the info . I haven't visited the forum previously but will have a look-see now

Reply to
pinky

Quite a premium for a little tannin! $156 CN about $125 US. Think I'll stick with the fresh fruit and the occasional kit.

Reply to
Tom

Would that I could buy fresh red wine grapes or freshly pressed juice in UK. But I can't!

So I use kits for my single varietal red wines -- and I have been and am very critical about them. And I tinker with them ( as pp said above) -- mainly to try and increase the "astringency" ( "bite" ) that I like in my red wines. Last year I started to add extra tannin to the initial fermentation stage but I am only just bottling last years wines and I still have to come to any opinion about the results. I also have a tendency to over oak -- well no -- not really -- because I generally find that the "oakiness" falls back after some months in bottle. But I usually worry about it just the same!

Reply to
pinky

I'm amazed that some beer or winemaking store doesn't import French, Spanish or German grapes for home winemakers. It's common here where I live for stores to truck in California grapes by the ton for home winemakers. Trevor...I think there is a nitch business waiting for someone where you live.

Bill Frazier Olathe, Kansas USA (Kansas City area)

Reply to
William Frazier

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