Instead of adding water to and Island Mist kit to make 23L for a sweet wine of 6,5% alcohol,I added only so much water to make it 10.5% alc. I will add the full contents of the F-pack to get a wine closer to an Ice wine (imitation) than to an original Island Mist wine. Anybody has done that or has anything against doing that?
TIA, Guy
Guy:
If you want to make an ice wine from a kit...buy an ice wine kit. There are some good ones out there. So far, I prefer Vineco's Ken Ridge Classic white ice wine. However, the clear winner at the recent Winemaker awards was a Vidal Ice wine from Spagnols. I have not tried it.
You can, however, turn the Island Mist kit into a DESSERT WINE, similar to an ice wine. I have not done this with Island Mist, but I have done it with Niagara Mist, and things should work the same.
I made the base as a less than 11 litre batch so that I could use a 3 gallon/11 litre carboy. Not certain what exact size, but would guess about 10 litres. Then made it as per usual. Used all the additives, and all of the F-pack.
The first time I used one package of yeast (EC-1118) and fermentation was very slow. The second time I added a second package and it seemed faster.
The customer really likes the Peach Chardonnay dessert wine, and has said that she will probably do another in the future. I found the Strawberry White Zin that we did for ourselves a bit strong in the strawberry flavour. Would probably use 2/3 to 3/4 of the F pack if there is a next time. (My wife has recently found out that she is diabetic, so we'll have to avoid neat stuff like ice & dessert wines. Not that we drank a lot of it.)
Steve
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