Question:
Recently I bought a couple of 19 litre buckets of varietal juice from a place in Ontario, the price was good, bought a White Zin and a Muscat bucket. Expose the juice to air, warm it up, and it will be fermenting before long. Fairly affordable, easy, no kits to mess with. The only unfortunate thing is that since the must is already set to automatically ferment, I didn’t know if reserving some juice and keeping it cold or frozen would have benefitted me for sweetening it later with that same juice. So I didn’t. Right now there’s a bit of a funny bite to the taste of the must, after it’s almost fermented all the way to dryness. I need to stir the batches to release the CO2, and perhaps some of the taste is from the fact that I see these as sweeter wines and they taste so dry right now. They I’ve treated the 5 gallons with 1/4 tsp. Pot. metabi, and 1.5 tsp of sorbate…. What would be the best way to sweeten these batches? With the sugar syrup? I was planning on helping the muscat with some welches white grape juice, adding natural juice and sugar for the sweetning. What about the white zin? any suggestions? anyone have any experiences with such juices? thanks. Rick Vanderwal fremont
Response:
Rick, I am also from Ontario and make wine from juice purchased as it is harvested and settled in the Niagara Region. Making wine from juice can be as challenging as making it from fresh grapes. The only difference is that you don’t have to crush the grapes. Making wine from a kit is a little easier in that it is generally a recipe approach and the instructions are very basic. When making wine from fresh grapes or juice there are numerous options, some of these options achieve the same thing in different ways, others result in a different style and still others can be disastrous. The following matters are especially critical: 1) protecting your must/wine from excessive O2. 2) protecting your must/wine from spoilage organisms 3) ensuring your approach gives you the style of wine you want 4) stabilizing and clearing your wine There are of course many other issues but the aforementioned are important ones. The first point is achieved by keeping your wine exposed to a minimum of oxygen by racking into containers once fermentation slows down and keeping all containers topped up. Also reasonable levels of sulfite are important after the alcoholic fermentation is finished and this is important for achieving the second point but also helpful in achieving point #1 as well since sulfite provides some anti-oxidant effect. The third point is achieved mainly by the variety of wine, the way it is handled, particularly with respect to a malo-lactic fermentation (MLF) that you may or may not want depending of the style of wine desired, and finally by the sweetness level from totally dry to quite sweet. The final point is important as your wine should be acceptably clear and stable before bottling. Stability is primarily but not exclusively a matter of an appropriate sulfite level to prevent spoilage and a MLF in your bottles. I would suggest you review a good winemaking site such as: www.wineloverspage.com/cgi-bin/links/linkgroup.cgi?lt=2&cat=11 this site will give you several winemaking sites, one of which is an excellent on line manual for winemaking http://home.att.net/~lumeisenman from an outstanding winemaker and gentleman, Lum Eisenman who is a regular contributor to this group as well as from Jack Kellar who is also a regular contributor on this newsgroup and is an excellent resource site at http://winemaking.jackkeller.net/index.asp with especially good information of non-grape wines. Good luck, Glen Duff
– Hide quoted text — Show quoted text – Recently I bought a couple of 19 litre buckets of varietal juice from a place in Ontario, the price was good, bought a White Zin and a Muscat bucket. Expose the juice to air, warm it up, and it will be fermenting before long. Fairly affordable, easy, no kits to mess with. The only unfortunate thing is that since the must is already set to automatically ferment, I didn’t know if reserving some juice and keeping it cold or frozen would have benefitted me for sweetening it later with that same juice. So I didn’t. Right now there’s a bit of a funny bite to the taste of the must, after it’s almost fermented all the way to dryness. I need to stir the batches to release the CO2, and perhaps some of the taste is from the fact that I see these as sweeter wines and they taste so dry right now. They I’ve treated the 5 gallons with 1/4 tsp. Pot. metabi, and 1.5 tsp of sorbate…. What would be the best way to sweeten these batches? With the sugar syrup? I was planning on helping the muscat with some welches white grape juice, adding natural juice and sugar for the sweetning. What about the white zin? any suggestions? anyone have any experiences with such juices? thanks. Rick Vanderwal fremont
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