Dry hopped white wine

[PJM 805]

I stumbled upon a winery who sold a dry hopped white wine which tasted quite good, white wine for the hazy/new england IPA lover. I'm thinking of making one with my next batch of Chardonnay, I'm curious if anyone else has dry hopped a white wine and if so what hops and how many ounces per gallon you used?

 

[JohnSand]

I haven't made any wine, but dry hopped wine sounds interesting. Welcome aboard, keep us posted.

 

[Plasticmetal]

I'm intrigued by this idea - May try a batch myself early next year depending on how things go. This is definitely worth looking into.

I did some quick Googleing and only found 2 commercial examples, one using sauv blanc, mosaic, and citra hops and the other with "white wine", citra, cascade, and galaxy. There are a few folks on Reddit who've tried this as well with chardonnay and others reporting success. Seems like folks were dosing between 3-5 grams in a 5-gallon batch, not sure how long they were keeping it in there for though.

This goes against what my gut said on first read-though, as I would have probably gone for something low AA for an emphasis on bittering or adding floral notes. This sort of thing is wild west stuff though so do what your heart tells you.

Last: I would for sure stabilise your batch before trying this. That way if it goes off the rails you can still back-sweeten to course-correct. If you're using a wine kit for the base batch I'd siphon off half to play with and keep the other stock as an additional insurance policy in case you need to water down the hopped portion. Either way though remember that ageing will be a major factor and that the wine will mellow with time - Don't freak out if it's pretty raw out of the gate.

Welcome to the forum, please let us know if you try this!

 

[mashdar]

I'd be tempted to use some of those diesely NZ hops with a NZ Sauvignon Blanc. But maybe that's a bit too on-the-nose?

(No experience. I had a hopped mead, but it wasn't my cup of tea.)

edit: corrected varietal, wrote cab sauv at first

 

[PJM 805]

Thank you for all the info, especially stabilizing it first, I might just do that. One of the wines you saw could've been the wine that I had tried called Aaron's Revenge from a winery called Pali Wine in Santa Barbara which is also sauv blanc with mosaic and citra which inspired the idea. Luckily I'm in wine country, so I'll be using fresh grapes, just waiting for them to reach 23 brix.

 

[Rish]

Welcome to HBT! My thought is take a commercially made wine that you like and dry hop it in the bottle (or split into several smaller bottles to try different hops/combos) to see how you like before making a big batch. Good luck!

 

[IAmPistolPete]

I actually experimented with the idea this spring. I had ordered a bucket of frozen Sauvignon Blanc grapes that unfortunately took 8 days to arrive Cali to Boston [thanks FedEx]. Who knows how many days it took to defrost but a white wine sitting on skins for days is no bueno. Came out vegetal, stemmy, bitter. Tried dry hopping with Nelson Sauvin. I thought I was a genius until I did some research & found out it wasn't all that revolutionary . It def helped for a while but a few months later it went back to crap [just like my IPAs] Carbonated it & now it's tolerable but not good. Now I'll only order grapes during colder months - lesson learned.

 

[bernardsmith]

When I make mead and I often add hops to boiling water for 20 minutes and then at "flameout" and then for 3 to 4 days just before bottling. Just made a mead with added malted chocolate barley that I hopped with Galaxy hops and is undergoing bottle carbonation right now. All that said, dunno that I would dry hop a grape wine. I generally like to make the mead that hop low alcohol mead around 6 or 7% ABV. to be quaffed much like a beer and not drunk like a 12 to 14% wine