Turning wine into brandy

Any wine can be made into brandy. In fact the quyality of the wine and the quality of the brandy are not related. Grappa for instance is made from pomace.

Unfortunately there is no legal way to make brandy in the US without expensive permits.

What are the determining factors for the quality of the resultant brandy?

Do you have any idea of the expected efficiency conversion factor?

Are there specific styles of wine that are better for making brandy?

Damn, that means I can't do it. My friend is a Canadian working on a contract here for another six months - then back to British Columbia. Maybe he can do it there.

Dick

Distilling is as illegal in Canada as it is in the United States.

wd41

Now, if he moved to New Zealand...

It's all about the missed tax revenue here.

Steve

Well with brandy, you will distill out the acids and more volitile compounds like methanol and ethyl acetate (that is why you can make it from pomace, something that when fermented would leave a lot of methanol, treating vegetable material with pectinase releases methanol).

So really wines that are not of good of a quality can make fine brandies, wines with either very low acidity that would not age well are traditionally distilled into brandy, and wines that have excessively high acidity can also be made into brandy.

What you do want is a very defined fusel alcohol character. Because brandy is usually distilled once, a lot of the fusel character will remain in the spirit. Now the exact fusel character that is needed is really only known to a master distiller. What I do know is the wine quality does not necessarily mean high quality brandy (and vice versa).

You guys are stupid. It is not illegal to home distill. It is very legal. You can’t do more than I think 5 gallons at a time and you can’t sell it but you can do it that was made into law long before the internet home computers or cell phones so stop listening this garbage