Hippie Wine Anyone?

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pizzaman

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Background: Over the last two years I have tried various ways of making wine. While I'm getting better and better at making beers and meads, I just can't seem to grasp this wine concoctificationism. The root of this problem is most likely that I have never had a wine that I enjoyed, and therefore I have no real base for how to make a good wine. I have been to a few wine-tasting classes and shows, sampled some of what others have said is very good wine...it all tastes like sour juice to me. Of course my wife loves wine, and will only allow me to continue brewing if I at least try to make her wine every now and then....

Foreground: So after bottling ten gallons of damned good beer today, I was looking at the shelf in my kitchen that has become my wine cabinet, cluttered with bottles of failed attempts at making drinkable wine, and in a drunken rage dumped all of it(no not down the drain silly, it is alcohol after all) into a carboy. I followed this with some orange juice(I have recently found that my wife loves a properly fermented orange juice), some various fermentable sugars I have had success with in making beers and meads, poured in some dissolved tannin, acid blend, pectic enzyme, yeast nutrient, and crushed campden tablets, and sealed it up to rest for a day or so. The abv of all the wines added was 10-12%, after the additional sugars the gravity was up to 1.045 which should make for an additional 6% abv if anything happens to this globbitygoop. It's resting now, I'll be pitching some montrachet onto it tomorrow night....I can't help but wonder if the homebrewing gods will forgive me for making something so terribly awful. Thinking back on it now, my thought process must've gone something like this: "None of this wine tastes any good, people drink it when I put it in front of them, but never EVER ask for more...maybe if I mix it all together and bump up the alcohol noone will ever NEED to ask for more...muahahahaha(laughter trails off into the darkness with me madly pouring gallons of crappy wine into a carboy)"
:drunk:
 
Hey, if it makes good drink do it! Just write down what went in so you can reproduce it if you accidentally make a fantastic concoctionificationary wonder!

Alternately, when you come across a bad bottle of red wine, do what the young kids in spain do: get a bottle of cola, drink half and fill it up with the swill. Actually not a bad drink!

Ah, here's the link: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Calimocho
 
2 days after pitching now...still no noticeable airlock activity...starting to wonder if I should pitch again from a well-built starter. I've been giving the carboy a swirl every now and again and when I do so it bubbles up, but the airlock does nothing. I'll probably just leave it alone for a week and take a gravity reading, if it's still high I'll pitch from a starter and give it another try.
 
Try the starter. If your pH is way low from the juice it may take a few days to start. A tiny bit of calcium carbonate could help if the problem is pH.
 
According to the wiki, a starter can kill a dry yeast and since all I use is dry yeast I won't be doing that...
 
I am just going to back slowly out of this thread now...

I really should follow suit but I just can't help myself:

You need to acclimate your starter to the higher alcohol concentration.
Get a good starter going and then pour in an equal amount of your devils concotion, if you have the patients repeat this one more time when the yeast gets going again - then pour the whole works into your fermentation vessle.
 
Thanks for the replies. Since all I have is dry yeast I wont be doing a starter. When I pitched I rehydrated in warm water with some honey in it, this should be fine. I do understand the idea of making a starter to handle a high-alcohol must, but this must is only 1.045..not high at all for any wine yeast. I am wondering if the must having alcohol in it already could be causing a late start, though I really doubt it as in the past I have repitched already high alcohol meads with added honey and gotten good results. I'll continue waiting and check gravity on monday.
 
have you ever tried a wine kit? I"m on my first ever wine fermentation and used a Wine Expert kit. It was stupidly easy, and even though its not bottled yet, its already tasting like a decent Chianti (a bit thin but that was expected since its at the lower end of thier kits).

I started hitting winetalk.com and people there make wine from welch's very successfully, though I bet it takes a little aging and getting used to vs. 'traditional' wines.
 
Posted by pizzaman...

2 days after pitching now...still no noticeable airlock activity...

Did you check the OJ for preservatives?

Had any of the wines you added to the olio been stabilized?

Add some yeast nutrient, and re-pitch every other day until it takes off.

Pogo
 
No preservatives, no previous stabilizations. I'm gonna stick to my hurry up and wait method unless someone comes up with a good reason not to. Again though, thanks for the replies.
 
I feel like I'm driving past a high speed wreck on the highway with dead, mangled bodies strewn hither and yon, and I just can't stop myself from slowing down to get a peek...

No offense but adding a bunch of bad wines together doesn't give you a better wine, it just gives you a whole lot of bad wine. You don't blend to cover up flaws, it doesn't work. You rather blend to bring out the best of what you are blending. And adding a bunch of stuff to already finished, not very good wine is just throwing away more money. I'd STRONGLY recommend going to Jack Kellers site and reading up there. Wine really isn't hard, it's a LOT easier to make than beer. The one thing that is very different from making beer is that wine takes a LOT more time than beer. Even the kits that advertise being ready in XYZ weeks will taste a lot better if you double, triple or more the timeframes. But a kit is a good place to start.

PTN
 
I'll probably give a kit a whirl the next time swmbo wants me to make a batch. This "hippie-wine" experiment was just that, an experiment I decided after a day of brewing and maybe one too many beers. If it doesn't work out I'm out like $6..and a few bottles of bad wine. On another note, there is airlock activity and active fermentation now three days after pitching.
 
According to the wiki, a starter can kill a dry yeast and since all I use is dry yeast I won't be doing that...

No it doesn't. The wiki says that a starter isn't needed with dry yeast, not that it'll kill it. When you make a starter, you're pitching yeast into a volume of sugar water for the yeast to propogate. When you pitch directly into the wort or must, you're pitching the yeast into ....... a volume of sugar water. It's the same thing, just different volumes.
 
Gravity is down to 1.03 today, it already tastes better than any of the individual wines originally did. The bread-doughy smell that was apparent is gone and it actually has a rather smooth and clean taste. Obviously too sweet to rack today, I think I'll rack onto some campden and potassium sorbate when it gets down to about 1.015 and let it clear. Hopefully it'll be there by friday when I brew my BlackberryWit.

With my new cornies on the way I'm trying to decide whether I should bottle or keg this...it does taste a lot like a champagne or a strong wine cooler that would be great carbed and chilled, maybe I'll do half and half.

The bad part is that if this is really good it'll be impossible to replicate exactly as I didn't keep any notes about the original wines...
 
Wine Porn:

hippieWine1.JPG


The moldy looking crap floating on top is the pulp from the OJ. Note: This is a reusable 5 gallon water bottle, not a better bottle...cost me $5 at HEB. Drilled hole in cap for airlock/blowoff. If you decide to use one of these for a carboy and don't like to use bungs for some reason, buy a roll of threading tape and wrap it around the thread a few times, this will make an airtight seal when the cap is screwed on.

Closeup of the pulp:
hippieWine3.JPG
 
wifey and I decided to do some taste testing of this tonight and....it's freaking awesome! Smooth, crisp, high alcohol but not harsh...because all the wines had already been aged for over a year they each brought out their own unique characteristic. It honestly tastes like an aged mead, and it's not even done fermenting out yet...I'm gonna rack and stabilize tomorrow and let it clear for a couple weeks, but I'm sure we'll continue tasting it along the way.
 
Man, I'd have tried just making sangria. Some strawberries and a couple lemons can make any red tasted good.
 
It got down to 1.015 today so I racked it onto 5 campden tabs and 2.5 teaspoons of potassium sorbate, then topped up to 5 gallons. 5 gallons of deliciously refreshing 18% fresh fruit hippie wine.
 
Very nice. Glad it worked out for you.

Reminds me of one time when I was down at the Hutterite colony. They asked me if I wanted a glass of wine and I accepted. They set down a clear plastic bottle that had a hand written label on it:

Grape. For men.


It tasted like Kool-Aid and antifreeze. I had to choke down a whole glass just to be polite. I declined a second glass. Had to drive, you know.
 
Racked this onto 5 more campden tabs yesterday. As I was racking I kept stealing samples of it and man was it good. It cleared up really nice into a light orange color. I'll post picks the next time I steal a sample.
 
I still haven't gotten around to bottling this, we've been "sampling" it pretty regularly for the last couple of months, I think I racked it back in june or july, it's starting to taste like water now. If I had to guess I'd say it is down to about 6-8% alcohol. I'm considering dumping a bunch of fruit and honey in it and seeing if I can't get fermentation going again to boost abv and add some flavor. Not sure how long it takes for the campden and sorbates to lose their effect enough for fermentation to restart, it was about a year last time...
 
It got down to 1.015 today so I racked it onto 5 campden tabs and 2.5 teaspoons of potassium sorbate, then topped up to 5 gallons. 5 gallons of deliciously refreshing 18% fresh fruit hippie wine.

now it's 6-8%??? impossible unless you added water to decrease the ABV in a fermenting beverage.. Someone is smoking something..LOL
 
like i said i've been "sampling" it regularly for months as well as racking it. for anyone who knows anything about wine, everytime you rack it you top it up with water to reduce head space. sorry you weren't aware of that svengoat, maybe next time you have a smartass comment you should read what you're replying to eh...LOL
 
like i said i've been "sampling" it regularly for months as well as racking it. for anyone who knows anything about wine, everytime you rack it you top it up with water to reduce head space. sorry you weren't aware of that svengoat, maybe next time you have a smartass comment you should read what you're replying to eh...LOL

Well, I understand that others might have joked about decreasing the ABV, but your tone here is pretty dick-ish.

If you're topping up with so much water that you're watering down your wine, you're doing it wrong. I've probably made 600 gallons more of wine than you have, and I have yet to insult others and tell them that topping up decreases your ABV more than 50%.

If you went from 18% ABV to 8% ABV, you added 5 gallons of water to it. I have a feeling your calculations are off.

If it's good, drink up. I'm glad it worked out for you.
 
dick-ish is my middle name. haven't you seen any of my other threads? hell, i've been nearly banned from this forum a few times, and "successfully" banned several more. i love it when people dish **** out and then get all offended when it's dished right back to em. makes me laugh a little in that warm fuzzy place on the inside. you know the place i'm talking about.
 
dick-ish is my middle name. haven't you seen any of my other threads? hell, i've been nearly banned from this forum a few times, and "successfully" banned several more. i love it when people dish **** out and then get all offended when it's dished right back to em. makes me laugh a little in that warm fuzzy place on the inside. you know the place i'm talking about.

I'm not one to dish **** out and enjoy getting it back.

If you can't play nice, go play somewhere else.
 
like i said i've been "sampling" it regularly for months as well as racking it. for anyone who knows anything about wine, everytime you rack it you top it up with water to reduce head space. sorry you weren't aware of that svengoat, maybe next time you have a smartass comment you should read what you're replying to eh...LOL

lol lol lol lol........lol
 
like i said i've been "sampling" it regularly for months as well as racking it. for anyone who knows anything about wine, everytime you rack it you top it up with water to reduce head space. sorry you weren't aware of that svengoat, maybe next time you have a smartass comment you should read what you're replying to eh...LOL

For anyone that knows anything about common sense is that Most people rack to smaller containers..that way they don't change anything.
oh yeah...... lol (at you)
 
You know, it's ok to have absolutely no idea what you are doing with your winemaking. We've all made mistakes before, I'm made a few doozies. That's how you learn. But to have no idea what you are doing and to act like a pompous ass is a bad combination. To revel in being a pompous ass and celebrate getting tossed off other boards because you are such a pompous ass is the mark of a real knucklehead.

Hopefully you will sober up tomorrow and have the common sense to edit your posts.

PTN
 
The term "you can't pollish ****" comes to mind. But I like the thinking, if it's going to be crappy it might as well be strong. Cheers.
 
Here's my experience with wines from scratch.

1) They take forever to mature. Most of my wines are drinkable at 1 year, and hit their stride at 2 years. My dandelion wine took 3 years. No joke.

2) A little sweetening goes a long way, especially on fruit wines. Wine conditioner is your friend. If its too late for that, try a little conditioner in the glass. Honey also works, but doesn't dissolve well in a glass of chilled white wine.

3) If your wines are a bit flat, add some concentrated grape juice (the good stuff, not the drinking juice from the freezer section) or some chopped raisins.

Out of curiosity, what were these wines that tasted so bad to you? Whites? Reds? Fruit wines?
 
MOD EDIT- Don't start again.

to the other responses, also very insightful, I was not aware that you should rack to a smaller container as every recipe I've read says to, and if you'll notice I have quotes here to indicate that I'm "quoting" someone: "Rack, top up and refit airlock", referenced here by jack keller from winemaking.jackkeller.net, I only included a couple of his recipes but you get the idea no?
winemaking: Bilberry Wines
winemaking: mustang grape wine

I guess you should tell him that he's not supposed to top up his wines, I'm sure he'd love to hear from you and your expertise.

now lets take a look at my last useful statement "If I had to guess I'd say it is down to about 6-8% alcohol. I'm considering dumping a bunch of fruit and honey in it and seeing if I can't get fermentation going again to boost abv and add some flavor. Not sure how long it takes for the campden and sorbates to lose their effect enough for fermentation to restart, it was about a year last time..."

so again, here is the question, in bold for your viewing ease:

How long should it take for campden and sorbates to lose their effect enough for fermentation to restart?
 
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