Need some help!

[Dbaker59]

I am new to wine making, and ran in to a problem on my first venture.
I ordered a wine making starter kit and a Cabernet Sauvignon recipe kit from Midwest Supplies. I followed the instructions included with the kit precisely. At time of bottling I tasted the wine for the first time. It tasted yeasty; but even worse, it had an overpowering taste and smell from the metabisulphite I added to the wine during the clarification stage. The wine is not drinkable at all.
Unfortunately, Midwest Supplies has not been very helpful. So I came here.
PS:
This wine was intended as home made Christmas presents for several friends and family. Not so sure I can give it as a present now.

 

[bernardsmith]

Hi Dbaker59 - and welcome.
Yeasty tasting wines can be caused by two different issues. The first is that the wine is very "green" and has not had enough time for the yeast to go through all its chemical reactions and actions to clean up after itself.. When did you start this batch and how long did it suggest - and then recommend (not the same thing) that you allow this to age before bottling?
The second cause of a yeasty smell in a wine - and this may be counter intuitive - is that you under-pitched the yeast - that is to say, you added too few viable yeast cells to the must. What yeast did you use? How much yeast did you pitch (add)? How did you pitch the yeast (did you make a starter? Did you rehydrate the yeast? If you rehydrated or created a starter what was the difference in temperature between the starter and the must?

A smell of metabisulfite is different. Some people are very sensitive to the smell of sulfur dioxide and you might be one of them. Can you ask someone else in your home to sniff the wine to see if they also detect the smell you smell? The amount of SO2 the kit would have asked you to add (and this would be a very , very different concentration than the amount you would be using to sanitize your tools and vessels ) is about 50 ppm (parts per million), or about 1 campden tablet (crushed per gallon) I cannot detect the SO2 at that concentration.